Liverpool, England: August 5, 2021: Veeam Software, the leader in Backup solutions enabling Modern Data Protection, today announced that Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), one of the largest public universities in the United Kingdom, has replaced its backup software with Veeam Availability Suite to improve data protection. Veeam backs up and replicates reliably, verifies recoverability and recovers in minutes. Veeam also offers additional ransomware protection in the form of immutable backups on-premises and off-premises. Furthermore, Veeam is more affordable than legacy backup and easier to use, saving the university £150,000 over five years and four weeks of backup management time annually.
“Data drives education, so protecting data is our top priority,” said Mark Smith, Senior Operations Officer at LJMU. “Veeam is consistently reliable and so easy to use — it’s the best fit for us.”
Smith said the money saved with Veeam enabled the university to invest in new technology including Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365. “The decision to extend Veeam protection to Office 365 was obvious because Microsoft doesn’t offer comprehensive backup, and since we currently have hybrid Exchange and OneDrive environments, we don’t want to lose access to historical emails, OneDrive files and Teams’ data while we transition to the cloud. Teams’ data grew significantly during the pandemic as students, faculty and staff worked remotely, so protecting it is critical.”
Microsoft Office 365 is the university’s first step in its cloud journey, and the next step may be Azure. Veeam offers native Azure backup and recovery, as well as direct restore, which would restore the university’s on-premises IT infrastructure to Azure for disaster recovery (DR). “One of the things we like best about Veeam is easy cloud integration, so we’re also considering Veeam’s immutable backups in cloud object storage to strengthen ransomware protection,” Smith said. “In the meantime, we activated Veeam’s Possible Ransomware Alarm to alert us to abnormal activity on each virtual machine (VM).”
Smith said the team also appreciates Veeam licensing because it’s simple and portable. Any workload can be backed up across any environment. For now, Veeam backs up and replicates 150 TB across 310 VMs (and a few physical servers) on-premises and to DR sites.
Rick Williams, Operations Officer at LJMU, deployed Veeam. He said he quickly realized the university had been missing out on helpful and beneficial functionality such as DataLabs to verify the recoverability of backups and replicas (via SureBackup and SureReplica), Instant VM Recovery to recover whole VMs quickly and Veeam Explorers for Microsoft Exchange and Oracle for fast granular recovery. This functionality, combined with reliable backup that doesn’t require extensive management, saves the IT team approximately four weeks annually.
“To be honest, what’s most helpful about Veeam is being able to set it and forget about it,” Williams said. “Our team is relatively small, so we don’t have extra time to look after backups. Legacy backup required extra time and resources that don’t exist, making it more of a burden than a benefit. Veeam is the opposite — it’s helpful because it monitors backups and alerts us if there’s an issue, which happens rarely, but if there is an issue, it’s usually a configuration problem on our part. My point is that Veeam has supported us from the start, beginning with after-sales help. We didn’t even know who our sales contact was for legacy backup. Having a positive relationship with a vendor that is actually helpful is a massive benefit.”
To learn more, visit https://www.veeam.com/success-stories/liverpool-john-moores-university.html or https://www.veeam.com.
About Veeam Software
Veeam is the leader in backup, recovery and data management solutions that deliver Modern Data Protection. We provide a single platform for cloud, virtual, SaaS, Kubernetes and physical environments. Our customers are confident their apps and data are protected and always available with the most simple, flexible and reliable platform in the industry. Veeam protects over 400,000 customers worldwide, including more than 82% of the Fortune 500 and over 60% of the Global 2,000. Veeam's global ecosystem includes 35,000+ transacting technology partners, resellers, service providers, and alliance partners, and has offices in more than 30 countries. To learn more, visit www.veeam.com or follow Veeam on LinkedIn @veeam-software and Twitter @veeam.