Today marks Safer Internet Day.

Safer Internet Day (SID) is organised by Insafe in February of each year to promote safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially amongst children and young people across the world. Safer Internet Day 2012 will take place on Tuesday 7 February 2012, centred on the theme “Connecting generations and educating each other”, where we encourage users young and old to “discover the digital world together…safely”!

In light of Safer Internet Day, Redstor are pleased to be able to offer a hosted, e-safety service – a virtual teaching assistant for schools.

Working in partnership with Securus and the Lucy Faithful Foundation (www.lucyfaithfull.org – a child protection charity), our e-safety service combines the best e-safety training and advice for school staff with the technical confidence offered by the leading proactive computer monitoring software, Securus (going further than just content-filtering and web-blocking).

Redstor E-Safety is designed to protect and safeguard children and staff within schools by monitoring school computers and alerting staff when a pupil puts themselves or others at risk. It is also designed to improve the e-safety outcomes and behaviour of pupils, whilst encouraging children to act more responsibly creating a better environment for learning. Utilising the service can also help schools attain a higher Ofsted standard based upon “Safeguarding Children”, whilst also supporting a schools’ legal duty of care.

For more information, please visit http://www.redstor.com/esafety.html or give us a call on 0118 951 5200.

We’re pleased to announce that Redstor were selected for the inaugural Little British Battlers event hosted by TechMarketView.

Redstor were one of twelve ‘small but perfectly formed’ UK-owned software and IT services companies selected by the TechMarketView team.

Paul Evans and Tony Ruane were given the opportunity to present their wares to the TechMarketView team last week.

For more information, please visit: http://www.techmarketview.com/ukhotviews/archive/little-british-battlers-battling-and-winning-4

Here’s an extract of some of the comments from TechMarketView:

“The impressive thing about Reading-based Redstor is the way it has continued to shift its business model to respond to market disruption. It’s the sort of flexibility that many a larger infrastructure services player would struggle to deliver. Founded by lifelong friends Paul Evans and Tony Ruane in 1998, the company originally made its money from integration and reselling. But recent years have seen it shift decisively cloudwards, to the extent that it is now putting all its chips on the cloud-based storage and back-up opportunity. We agree with Evans and Duane that there is plenty of growth to come in their target market. We also think its wholesale-only strategy gives it one way of protecting itself from the arrival of bigger brands and deeper pockets in that market.”

Redstor attended Cloud Expo Europe this week, a technology exhibition hosted by The Cloud Industry Forum to enable organisations to further understand the benefits cloud computing can give them around business agility, risk mitigation and reductions in management complexity.

We were on the stand with Equinix – our Data Centre and co-location provider – alongside various other cloud service providers who use their facilities. The show was very well attended, with 6,000+ registered delegates passing through the doors of Olympia. We had a number of very interesting conversations with both channel partners and end users – a common theme that appeared was around the increasing size of environments people are now looking to use Online Backup or Cloud Storage for. We found many video companies and financial houses keen to archive inactive data to more efficient platforms, several of whom are now interested in Redstor’s Cloud Archiving service. This would allow them to archive old data to the cloud.

It was also good to bump into some familiar faces in the shape of the Redstor channel partner community – those of you who were there, it was great seeing you and we’re glad to hear of the rewards you’re reaping from using a partner enabled cloud platform from Redstor.

BETT 2012 saw a record number of appointments on our stand with our Education channel partners. Like last year, the split between local authority ICT Support service teams and private sector ICT service providers was fairly even.

There was still unrivalled levels of interest in what is the most popular and longest running Online Backup for schools service in the UK – RBUSS. Many ICT service providers we met with are adding to this to their portfolio of ICT services for schools and those service providers who have offered the service in previous years continue to be delighted with the service.

Also on the Redstor stand was CentraStage, which is now being used to protect and manage devices in over 4,000 schools in the UK. We witnessed countless customer demos being hosted over the course of BETT, as well as breakout sessions with East Sussex LA who’ve used CentraStage to redesign their ICT services for schools. For those of you who didn’t make it to BETT or didn’t receive a demo of CentraStage whilst there, we’re running a webinar on Tuesday 24th January to provide an overview of CentraStage, simply click here to sign up and reserve your place!

Finally, 2012 could well be the year in which Redstor E-Safety becomes prominently used and deployed. Many schools are using E-Safety as a way of setting User Acceptance Policies for schoolchildren using ICT in the classroom, as well as allowing them to monitor cyber-bullying. At BETT, a number of our existing ICT service provider partners were keen to include Redstor E-Safety within their SLAs for the new school year.

Congratulations to our partner Joskos Solutions, who’ve delivered Redstor’s services to their schools, on winning the “ICT Services and Support” category at this year’s BETT awards.

This week sees the world’s largest event for educational technology roll into London as BETT takes over Olympia, bringing in 30,000 visitors to view the latest ICT solutions such as Online Backup for Schools and E-Safety.

Redstor have exhibited at BETT for many years now and have traditionally seen the majority of our appointments take place with ICT Schools’ Support Teams from Local Authorities. With the budget cuts biting and schools being given more autonomy, we have seen a swing towards private sector companies providing ICT services for schools. This resulted in 45% of our appointments in 2011 being with private sector ICT service providers. It remains to be seen whether or not 2012 will be the year in which the number of private sector providers meeting with us exceeds the number of Local Authority support teams – we will update you next week post-BETT.

Our stand at BETT is U23, feel free to pop by and discover more about our educational ICT services, including RBUSS+, our Online Backup for Secondary Schools service.

Cloud Backup and Storage provider Redstor, will be exhibiting at the Cloud Expo Europe Show at London’s Olympia between the 25^th and 26^th of January.

Redstor will be focusing on it’s Cloud Tiering Appliance which enables data to be moved from high-cost primary Network Attached Storage (NAS) environments to the Redstor Cloud.

The Cloud Tiering Service provides fully automated, policy-based file movement, enabling organisations to meet data growth challenges by improving capacity utilisation of high-cost primary storage, reducing the volume of data to be backed up and protected.

This service is based on and powered by EMC’s Atmos Storage Platform.

Redstor will be exhibiting with their data centre infrastructure partner, Equinix, on stand 331.

We look forward to meeting with you there.

In a recent news article, a Welsh Local Authority have received an ICO fine for £130,000 after breaching ICO legislation around data protection. This fine is the largest placed on a single organisation since those powers came into effect and is the latest incident in the area of council data loss.

Since April 2010, Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) have had the power to levy fines up to £500,000 on organisations who are found misplacing data or handling unsecure personal data. Redstor’s cloud data protection services offer organisations the chance to encrypt data and securely store data in the cloud. Since 2005, Redstor have been working with local government organisations to backup school data to our UK backup grid.

Redstor has been exhibiting at the recent EMC Rapid Fire Conferences in Edinburgh, Manchester and Twickenham.

The conference covered off several main themes: Information Intelligence – taking action on big data, Information mobility and accessibility – next generation data protection and recovery, cloud ready data centres and how to build trust in the Cloud space.

What was clear was that IT was all about services and outcomes and not about the technology. The Cloud is changing how IT is built, run and consumed and it is becoming all SLA governed.

At the event, Redstor has been featuring it’s popular Cloud Backup Service which is re-sold through over 130 partners. Redstor was also unveiling the EMC Cloud Tiering Service as a way to offload cold data to the Redstor Storage Cloud. Based around the EMC Cloud Tiering Appliance, the service is a policy based file tiering, archiving and migration service and all data is replicated between Redstor’s 2 UK data centres and is underpinned by the EMC Atmos platform. Archiving data off to the cloud is especially relevant given the projections of file based and block based data growth forecast at 80% and 31% compound respectively.

For further information on archiving data to the cloud or looking at online backup, you can call Redstor on +44 118 951 5200.

Come and join us at the BETT show in Olympia between 11th and 14th January at stand U23.

Redstor have been exhibiting for many years at the show since 2006 and have witnessed the transformations being made in the provision of ICT support services to schools.

Over the years, Redstor has been providing online backup services (now called cloud backup services) to primary schools through its partner base which has been predominantly ICT Schools’ Support team within Local Authorities. As the schools have developed more autonomy, and with the spending cuts in Local Authorities biting, we have seen a shift in the provision of services and last year 45% of our appointments were with private sector companies looking to or already providing support services to schools.  Will 2012 represent the first year when private sector Redstor appointments exceeds public sector?

More on BETT to follow on our blog and Redstor Twitter

CentraStage technology delivers simple, easy to use IT management at a very sensible price, combining a range of functionality in one platform. It allows IT support teams to manage and monitor PCs, laptops and servers, regardless of where devices are located and where the IT support team are based. It is perfect for businesses with a distributed IT environment and mobile workers. More importantly in the current climate we find that people are moving to CentraStage to improve their efficiency and reduce their costs.

So what does it do? Once the CentraStage agent is deployed to PCs, laptops, servers, it delivers through a single platform:

1)      Audit and asset management – know what hardware and software is out there.

2)      Monitoring – know the state of the environment, and what is about to fall over (or has done so). Monitor performance, security, backups etc.

3)      Software deployment and device configuration – target devices for one-off or scheduled recurring software deployments and config, reducing repetitive manual tasks.

4)      Remote support – instant diagnostics of devices via full remote task manager, and remote support options should you need access to individual devices.

5)      Reporting – audit/asset reports, health reports, activity reports.

6)      Power Management – reducing your carbon footprint