Sydney, Australia: March 8, 2018 - Veeam Software, the Availability for the Always-On Enterprise innovator, is helping Shire Christian School in Sydney, Australia, replace its legacy systems with virtualized applications to accelerate its digital journey, ensuring that critical IT infrastructure and the sensitive records of 850 students and 100 staff are always available. Since deploying Veeam Backup & Replication, the school has cut hundreds of hours a year previously dedicated to manual backups, while also ensuring sensitive data is safe and accessible. By moving to the cloud platform and implementing Veeam Cloud Connect, Shire Christian School streamlined its system, eliminated complexity, and improved security by encapsulating all backup and management traffic into a single port.
Shire Christian School is an independent, co-educational Prep to Year 12 school, which provides high-quality affordable education in Sydney’s southern suburbs. Like many schools, Shire Christian has begun a journey toward digital transformation. In shifting to a hyper-converged production environment – going from zero to 70% virtualization in just 12 months – the school needed a simple, reliable, and cost-effective availability solution to support an IT overhaul, including a shift away from Macs to a Microsoft environment, and a new off-site private cloud facility.
Improved Disaster Recovery Capability
Shire Christian School had been operating with legacy infrastructure that required manual backups to hard drives, which increased the risk of human error. Because of the time burden, full replications were infrequent. The school needed a more secure availability solution to maintain data integrity, uninterrupted workflows, and full compliance with privacy regulations around student records.
The Veeam solution now allows Shire Christian School to store and back-up to its on-site Nutanix-supported Dell servers and back-up virtual machines to off-site private FlexDR cloud using Veeam Cloud Connect. The solution also provided immediate disaster recovery capability for critical systems, which are regularly replicated on-site.
“IT has a very strategic role in education and the landscape at the school has definitely changed over the past ten years, from general computer labs to now more one-to-one use of devices and so on,” said Chad Walsham, IT Manager at Shire Christian School.
“In this digital age, schools like Shire Christian School have evolved from just teaching students in the classroom during school hours,” said Shaun McLagan, Senior Vice President, APJ at Veeam. “In addition to involving IT in learning, parents now expect to be able to access test scores, sporting schedules, changes to timetables, and much more. The threat of losing access to this information as well as student records to unscheduled downtime, or leaving them vulnerable to malware attacks, could not only mean losing access or compromising sensitive data but also would result in non-compliance with privacy legislation.”
Maintaining Data Integrity
“While data integrity has been around a long time in the corporate world, it's still a new idea in schools. We had to work with the board to help them understand just how critical this was,” said Walsham. “Since we're running on two disparate systems, the centralization of our backup has been incredibly helpful; and with regular reports we can identify any pain points before they have a chance to impact the school.”
A server failure once meant between one and three days of rebuilding the server and configuration. Now Shire Christian School has same-day restoration, plus immediate failover on key systems, meaning student, business and financial records and systems are always available, and their integrity is maintained.
Products Overview
Veeam Backup & Replication- delivers Availability for ALL workloads — virtual, physical, cloud (including VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V) — from a single management console.
Veeam Cloud Connect - makes it easy for Veeam customers to extend their backup infrastructure to the cloud. Veeam Cloud Connect also makes it easy for service providers to offer hosted backup repositories or complete backup services with Veeam.
About Veeam Software
Veeam recognizes the new challenges companies across the globe face in enabling the Always-On Enterprise, a business that must operate 24.7.365. To address this, Veeam has pioneered a new market of Availability for the Always-On Enterprise by helping organizations meet recovery time and point objectives (RTPO) of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data, through a fundamentally new kind of solution that delivers high-speed recovery, data loss avoidance, verified recoverability, leveraged data and complete visibility. Veeam Availability Suite, which includes Veeam Backup & Replication, leverages virtualization, storage, and cloud technologies that enable the modern data center to help organizations save time, mitigate risks, and dramatically reduce capital and operational costs, while always supporting the current and future business goals of Veeam customers.
Founded in 2006, Veeam has 53,000+ ProPartners and 282,000+ customers with the highest customer satisfaction scores in the industry. Headquartered in Baar, Switzerland, Veeam has offices in more than 30 countries. To learn more, visit https://www.veeam.com or follow Veeam on Twitter @veeam.