Liverpool Football Club is using remote back-up and recovery software to secure data at its stadium, training ground and online and physical shops.

The Premiership club previously used legacy tape-based disaster recovery systems, but wanted to switch to disk storage to increase the speed of back-up.

Back-up of data now occurs on an hourly basis, without interruptions to the system, even during peak periods, and guarantees a 100 per cent rate in retrieving lost data.

Supplier Backup Technology is providing the club with Asigra’s distributed back-up and recovery software at its Anfield stadium and two training grounds.

‘The online service has eliminated the ongoing hidden costs and wasted man hours we were experiencing with tape backup,’ said Liverpool IT manager Ken Webster. ‘This included buying and switching tapes and transferring tapes to the storage depot.

‘Our IT staff are now freed up to concentrate on developing new technologies to increase the productivity of the business.’

Data generated by the online ticketing information and club shop is protected, as is all emails from every office, as well as desktops and laptops of staff.

Backup Technology has also provided Liverpool FC with a spare redundant server so data can be restored in minutes if an existing server breaks down.

‘Should disaster strike, such as our PCs being permanently damaged, lost or stolen, or the online ticketing system crashing, this would be a major concern for us as a highly competitive business,’ said Liverpool network manager Ashley Harding.

‘We now know we can retrieve any lost data within minutes rather than days and with encryption of data in-flight and at-rest, stolen data cannot be read.’

Backup Technology is planning on adding Asigra’s latest software tool of continuous data protection (CDP) to Liverpool FC’s range of backup services in coming weeks.

CDP continuously monitors and stores any changes to files in real time and preserves copies of all previous versions of the file or object, so that the user can restore data to the point just before a data corruption took place.