Isle of Anglesey County Council (IoACC) is a local government authority supporting local businesses and the social and economic development of 70,000 people in North Wales. IoACC demonstrate leading social responsibility by providing a wide range of services for its residents such as cost of living and homelessness support, refuse collection, leisure facilities and roads. The council also shows its environmental commitment through the implementation of renewable energy projects, including wind farms, tidal power schemes and waste treatment plants. 

IoACC migrated its infrastructure to Exchange Online during the pandemic, with the information required to run these systems not being backed up which put the council and its users at risk. The backup of data is important, not only to protect against malicious ransomware attacks but also to comply with GDPR regulations. A ransomware attack could have proven very costly to IoACC if a ransom had to be paid to the attackers. In addition to this, an attack on the system would have also caused downtime for its users, impacting critical frontline services for its residents.

IoACC have also leveraged other Microsoft 365 solutions since the pandemic, such as Microsoft OneDrive and Teams. Using these systems without sufficient backup in place and understanding of the risk this posed to its residents, meant it became a high priority to find a solution.

Through consultation with their Bytes Account Manager and owing to a strong working relationship, IoACC’s ICT Infrastructure Manager prioritised this back-up project as Microsoft only store this information for a maximum of 90-days post subscription termination. Bytes’ Account Manager recognised these potential threats and provided and range of solutions, via a Bytes market overview.

The overview was especially helpful to IoACC as it gave a vendor-agnostic flavour of the solutions currently available on the market, while outlining the differences between each service and commercial licensing model.

After assessing each of the products available on the market, it was clear that the highly-recommended Rubrik Hosted Polaris solution ticked a lot of the boxes. The Rubrik tool was the most intuitive to use after an impressive demonstration, the software also provided backup for all Microsoft 365 services, without any reliance on the on-premises infrastructure.

“Rubrik is performing fantastically” the IoACC now have the confidence to periodically check the system knowing that the tool is going quietly about its business in the background. When ICT staff do need support, a ticket is raised and the problem is solved in a timely manner.

IoACC can now spend time focusing on providing the best service to its internal users and residents, without the risk of malicious ransomware attacks affecting its business as usual.