Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) is the leading charity dedicated to the protection of whales and dolphins. Their four goals are to end captivity, stop whaling, create healthy seas and to prevent deaths in nets.
WDC work globally through campaigns, lobbying, advising governments, conservation projects, field research, rescue, education and much more. They operate at international meetings and work across many seas and oceans, as well as through offices in the UK, North America, Germany and Australia.
With a global workforce of over 100 people in varying time zones, a robust, secure and reliable communications infrastructure is essential. WDC’s IT operations are run from their UK office in Wiltshire, so it’s imperative that all their solutions are able to run with minimal downtime and intervention.
As with many charities WDC face fundraising challenges, receiving support from individual donors, trusts, corporate partners and other stakeholders and have a clear plan of how the funding is spent throughout the year.
It’s important that they run offices overseas to give them global reach in order to help fight the threats to whales and dolphins all over the world. They fund the people, processes, overheads and activities needed to achieve their policy goals.
WDC use Cloud Heroes for a myriad of services, including superfast Ethernet, web hosting, domain names and SSL certificates. Their Ethernet services recently came into their own during the various lockdowns. With a superfast connection, everyone in the business was able to work from home straight away, without interruption or a degradation in service. This enabled them to continue to carry out their critical work.
The challenge
As a charitable organisation, costs need to be kept as lean as possible, for IT this can often result in prolonging equipment life rather than purchasing new kit. In some cases, this can work the opposite way and legacy kit quickly becomes a time and money drain.
Recently, WDC needed to improve their backup situation which was dependant on tape drives. Restoration was time consuming, tapes are costly and backup servers were needed on site. Onsite backup didn’t align with their business continuity plans, due to the risk involved to their operations should a disaster happen.
They needed a much faster, cheaper and more secure solution to remain efficient and streamlined.
The solution
Cloud Heroes advised overnight Cloud backup to be the most cost effective, quick and secure option.
As WDC also have superfast ethernet lines, the bandwidth required for overnight backup each day wasn’t a problem. So Cloud Heroes were able to carry out the migration of data to their UK-based data centres.
Cloud backup is fully encrypted with multiple restore points as standard and it comes with all the flexibility WDC needed to tie in with their business plans. They pay for the data backup volume they need, with the option to add more as the business scales. It’s a simple monthly rental plan with plenty of scope.
A full backup was carried out and then the data was moved to the cloud with multiple copies being stored for added security.
This enterprise level solution is ideal for any size business due to the flexibility of the monthly plans, they can simply be tailored to individual requirements. The backups are supported and managed by our experienced team of engineers 24/7/365 too.
The result
WDC now have a solution that is less time consuming, expensive and most importantly infinitely more secure. With less risk involved to their business operations, they have peace of mind that should the worst happen, they will be able to get their data back.
Cloud backup ties in with their business continuity plans and as they grow as an organisation, its simply a case of adding on more storage as and when they need it. This type of future proofing is something WDC have worked on with Cloud Heroes over many years.
WDC see Cloud Heroes as a huge support for planning, budgeting, business continuity and advice. With complete flexibility in their solutions and a worry-free estate, they can effectively manage their global operations.
“I very much see Cloud Heroes as the invisible hand that helps me run our IT Operations here at WDC. They assist me with everything from budgeting and planning to support and advice.
We have many websites that we run too, so it’s great to have all of those in one place without having to set constant renewal reminders, it’s all simply done via Cloud Heroes.
They know our business inside out and the challenges we face as a charity, so I trust them to provide solutions that not only solve a problem but that are future-proof and scalable.
As our operations are global, we have challenges with workers being based all over the world and having to manage everything myself from Wiltshire. Although this can sometimes mean late nights and early mornings, with the support I get from Cloud Heroes, these a few and far between. Often they have fixed something before anyone has even noticed an issue, we’ve never had an outage that’s caused us a problem.
Cloud Heroes definitely make my role a lot simpler as I can get on with the day to day, knowing that our infrastructure is robust and secure.”
Simon Hawkes, IT Manager, Whale & Dolphin Conservation