Databarracks Provide Hoseasons With a Holiday From Backups
13th January 2011
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Hoseasons is the leading provider of self-catering holidays in
the UK, marketing over 12,000 places to stay throughout Britain and
Europe in a wide range of coastal, countryside and city locations.
An award-winning reputation for prompt and friendly service,
coupled with an unrivalled range of holiday types, has made
Hoseasons a trusted and respected name in the holiday business for
over 60 years.
Operating from purpose built premises in Lowestoft, Suffolk, the
business employs over 200 highly trained staff and its state of the
art call centre; web-based reservations platform and newly
re-launched website together handle over 2 million telephone calls
and over 12 million web visits each year.
It is the efficiency of this online service, which has resulted
in a substantial increase in the use of the website, with 65% more
people booking online in 2009 than in 2008, and web sales now
making up over half of total volume. The UK self-catering market is
exhibiting strong growth and Hoseasons bookings are up to 30% ahead
of last year. This demonstrates the powerful appeal to customers in
the current economic climate for holidays which offer the
combination of quality, value, freedom and flexibility which are
key features of the Hoseasons range.
The dramatic increase in demand this year and the increasing
dependence on technology and the web in the company's business
processes prompted an urgent review of Hoseasons' back-up and
disaster recovery operations, as a precaution against any
catastrophic system failures. Emphasis was placed heavily on
technological advancements to remove any possibility for human
error and to increase reliability.
The consensus at Hoseasons was that there was a need to improve
on its existing back-up system, based on weekly offsite tape
backups. The business decided that a seven day Recovery Point
Objective (RPO) for booking databases and e-mail data was
unacceptable and therefore sought out an efficient automated method
of moving data offsite. Of vital importance to Hoseasons in
selecting a supplier for the new system was the inherent security
of sensitive customer data. Key among the required criteria in this
respect was a military standard level of encryption (AES) to ensure
that offsite copies of data were never stored in a readable format.
(Databarracks offer a minimum of 128 bit AES encryption as
standard)
In this and other required criteria Databarracks were successful
in rising to the challenges of Hoseasons' stringent brief, which
also demanded an exceptionally high level of daily reporting as a
core feature of the service.
Chris Read, Head of IT Operations at Hoseasons, said of the
company's review: "having looked around in the market place we
chose Databarracks as our online backup supplier because they were
very responsive to our needs and offered us a bespoke solution that
absolutely fitted our requirements. Our data is now extracted
overnight and we have complete visibility of the success of the
transfer. With the service now completely installed, tested and
bedded in for over 6 months, we have the security of our data as
complete as we specified it. We know that if we need to recover our
business-critical systems, whether in-house or to another location,
we will have readily available access to up to date backup data
24/7/365."
About Databarracks:
Databarracks is a leading provider of compliant, secure, and
effective online backup and data recovery services including
cutting-edge Virtual Disaster Recovery. Based in London,
Databarracks manages data security and availability for thousands
of customers globally, offering unparalleled levels of service for
companies of all sizes and profiles. Visit us on
www.databarracks.com
About Hoseasons:
Hoseasons is the leading provider of self-catering holidays in the
UK, marketing over 12,000 places to stay throughout Britain and
Europe in a wide range of coastal, countryside and city locations.
Visit: www.hoseasons.co.uk