Independent Colleges of Indiana Opts for Nirvanix

Nirvanix, Inc. announced that Independent Colleges of Indiana (ICI) has selected the Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network as a secure and cost-effective backup solution for its 31 member institutions.

One of ICI’s functions is to provide economies of scale in purchasing services that can be shared across its members. As such, ICI tested the Nirvanix cloud storage solution and contracted with Nirvanix to provide cloud-based backup services. Consortium members will begin leveraging the Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network using their existing backup applications. ICI expects Nirvanix cloud storage usage to reach hundreds of terabytes within the next 12 months.

"As the cost of higher education continues to rise, it’s clear that these institutions need to cut costs in areas that are not directly related to serving students. IT infrastructure is one of those areas and the cloud model provides an ideal solution. ICI and its member institutions are on the leading edge among higher education institutions in the paradigm change to harnessing the power and economics of the cloud," said Dru Borden, chief strategy officer, Nirvanix. "This is a trend that we expect all higher education institutions to follow thanks to the multitude of business and technology benefits that it’s proven to deliver."

"ICI is bringing a fully tested cloud-based backup solution from Nirvanix to 31 colleges and universities in Indiana, right-sized for our member institutions in terms of the numbers of copies, gateway device configuration and uptime levels required," said Robert D. Hodge, executive director of Collaborative Services, ICI. "With the Nirvanix solution we can leverage our existing backup applications, policies and procedures, and encrypt data at our site before sending it to the cloud, minimizing our privacy and confidentiality concerns. In addition, the Nirvanix solution gives our member institutions the key cloud economics benefit: predictive budget control while the marketplace and industry change."

Nirvanix cloud storage services are essentially an URL with a byte stream payload that is immediately consistent and globally replicated based on policy with infinite elasticity.

With Nirvanix’s battle-hardened, second-generation STaaS, ICI member institutions take advantage of cloud storage services designed from the ground up for five nines of data availability with built-in self-healing software for continuous data integrity. Its secure, granular multi-tenancy capabilities enable ICI member institutions to create subaccounts with their own usernames and passwords, and provide direction on where in the Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network the data is to reside.

"ICI presents a model for higher education institutions to follow," said Scott Genereux, president and CEO of Nirvanix. "The consortium’s adoption of cloud technology as a shared service across 31 colleges and universities provides unlimited and secure backup plus savings from economies of scale."

Nirvanix cloud storage services protect and secure data moving out of campus, ensuring that all files stored in the cloud are obscurificated as software de-identifies each physical file, removing the file name, owner and type. Combined with military-grade, multi-level security at the user, storage and physical data center levels, it provides secure backup and access for all ICI member institutions.