Commvault GO: University of Canberra in Australia Chooses Commvault and AWS S3 Storage

Commvault Systems, Inc. announced that the University of Canberra (UC) has implemented its Complete Backup & Recovery in combination with cloud-based storage from AWS to reduce costs and support the uptime of its digital student services.

“By integrating Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery with Amazon S3 and Glacier, we have reduced our overheads by AU$135,000. Our IT team can now focus on realising our digital vision for the students, rather than maintaining tapes,” said Justin Mason, associate director of vendor and operations for the university.

Ranked 34 in the 2019 Times Higher Education Young University Rankings, the university offers courses to around 14,000 students in Australia, Hong Kong, China, Vietnam, and Bhutan. It is also recognised in research excellence in disciplines such as genetics, clinical sciences, and public health.

It uses Complete Backup & Recovery to protect a variety of assets, including its student management system, website, finance platforms and business intelligence solution.

“Student experience is a major pillar of our digital strategy, but this can only be delivered by constantly ensuring that we are utlising the latest best practices to protect our IT services to students and the infrastructure that deliver those,” commented Mason.

By moving away from a tape-based process to cloud-based storage service, the university can automatically stream DR backup copies to Amazon S3 Infrequent Access (IA) storage and archive data that hasn’t been touched for 365 days to Amazon S3 Glacier storage.

“Ensuring data is recoverable in the case of a hack or cyber-attack is no longer a nice-to-have, but rather a critical business decision to guarantee the safety of educational institutions in Australia as we know them. Much like a homeowner would invest in home insurance in case of burglary, universities are reognising their students’ data is equally valuable, and taking the appropriate steps to safeguard it vs. the increasing threats directed towards higher education bodies today,” added Rob Malkin, VP ANZ, Commvault.

“Thanks to Commvault’s native integration with AWS, we can support our long-term retention requirements and enhance the overall student experience by providing better more reliable digital services. Having the data stored and managed by AWS in a location separate from our main data centers gives us confidence that our data is always readily available,” continued Mason.

The university can execute a full off-site DR backup daily instead of once per quarter, which helps to prevent disruption to its operations. Backups are updated every 30 minutes with new data copied to AWS in a matter of minutes or at a maximum of one day.

“Having a more robust and cost-effective DR platform supports our digital vision of becoming a global leader in higher education and research excellence,” ended Mason, who will be attending Commvault’s annual conference, Commvault GO, in October 2019, in Denver, CO.

Resources:
Recognised as a leader in the latest Forrester Wave: Data Resiliency Solutions, Commvault came out on top with the highest scores in the backup optimisation category.
Video: University of Canberra saved significant costs by using Commvault