ICT-23-017 Data Backup Solution covering all EA locations throughout Northern Ireland.

A Backup Solution is a fundamental requirement within any ICT infrastructure. It ensures that business critical data, applications and servers can be restored after accidental deletion, system changes or hardware failure. It is essential that a reliable backup system is in place to mitigate the risk of data loss and downtime for users. A backup system is essential to underpin any kind of Disaster Recovery (DR) procedure for the Education Authority.

EANI backup and DR strategy is currently satisfied by the deployment of Quest Rapid Recovery on multiple sites backing up to a local backup appliance, and replicating to a central DR location.

The Education Authority is dependent on a wide range of ICT services provided by infrastructure located in distributed data centres, server rooms, and comms rooms spread across multiple EA sites. Access to the data contained on EA provided systems is business critical to a high proportion of EA staff. It is essential therefore that data is backed up securely, on resilient reliable systems.

EA's Networks & Infrastructure service have produced a technical strategy including a solutions roadmap, which details the requirements, design and architecture of systems which will most effectively address the need to protect against cyber threats and other risks, while continuing with the ongoing process of consolidation and optimisation of all ICT systems.