Lockhart Independent School District

Learns an Important Lesson in Data Protection

Customer Challenge:
Protecting its critical student and financial records

Data Protection Strategy Put to the Test
Under most circumstances, a doubling of employees’ salaries would signal great prosperity and reward for a job well done. However, when the payroll at the Lockhart Independent School District (ISD) was accidentally doubled, it was a signal that something had gone horribly wrong.

Errors such as these put an organization’s data protection strategy to the test. Lockhart ISD says if this error happened a year before it did, a finance department administrator would have had to individually re-key the salaries for the school district’s 600 employees. However, with the district’s new data protection plan, the correct payroll data was restored in an instant.

Tape Doesn’t Make the Grade
Disaster recovery wasn’t always this easy for Lockhart ISD. Like most small and mid-sized organizations, the school district did data protection the way it’s always been done: by backing up the data to tape each night. However, this method of data protection earned a failing grade with the IT staff.

“We weren’t getting our tapes offsite to ensure recovery in the
event of a fire or flood, so I started to have my secretary walk
the tapes across the street to another school building each morning.
Not only that, but should something go wrong, we would have only
been able to restore data as of the night before.”
- Sylvia Evans, network administrator of Lockhart ISD

That’s if Evans was lucky. The backup to tape process is so rife with errors—from failed tape drives, to defective tapes, to human error in the process—that analysts estimate up to 50% of backups to tape fail to properly restore. There clearly had to be a better way.

A New School of Thought in Data Protection
Lockhart ISD uses Skyward school management software for all of its student and financial records. Evans was at a Skyward user conference when she heard the company talking about the LiveVault Online Backup and Recovery Service™, a way for organizations to protect their data using their existing Internet connections. Skyward is part of the LiveVault Partner Program.

“When I heard Skyward talking about LiveVault, it just seemed like a perfect solution to our backup woes,” said Evans. “LiveVault
automatically gets data offsite, so my secretary would be off the hook, and a third party would be sharing the responsibility for getting the backup done, instead of just myself.”

“A+” Service Without the Effort
LiveVault works by automatically and continuously backing up business server data via a secure Internet connection and storing it in a secure offsite facility, where it is available for immediate recovery in the event of a system failure, virus, human error or other disaster. The service goes beyond traditional backup methods by operating on a continuous, as well as scheduled, basis. This means that Lockhart ISD, by selecting the continuous backup option, can recover data up to the minute of the data-loss event, rather than up to the last time someone performed a tape backup.

The LiveVault service is designed for customers, such as Lockhart ISD, whose servers reside outside of major data centers. These customers are often small and mid-sized businesses or enterprise remote or branch offices, who have primarily relied on in-house tape backups to keep their data safe. LiveVault guarantees recovery of all critical data and assures that Lockhart ISD will return to the state of its data prior to a data-loss event. With tape-based backup, Lockhart ISD only had 50-50 odds of getting its data back—a poor report card by any standards.

“I’m just so thankful we already had LiveVault installed at the time we had this disaster,” said Evans. “When it came time to renew our
LiveVault service, our finance director had no problems in sending
the check, because the benefits of the service are so clear.”

When Lockhart ISD wants to restore information, an employee can log on to LiveVault’s Web-based user interface from any Internet connection and initiate a restore at the click of a button. Within minutes, critical files can be restored to the organization’s server. All backup and restore operations are monitored 24/7 by trained LiveVault employees who are experts in data protection.

Evans is so convinced of the value of LiveVault that she talks about the service wherever she goes. “I have recommended the service to other Skyward users, because it is so easy to use and it takes my mind off getting the backup done. LiveVault is an integral part of our disaster recovery plan.”