Catholic Education Western Australia protects 90,000 Microsoft 365 users with data resilience from Veeam

Catholic Education in Western Australia is the second-largest non-Government education provider in the state, educating almost 17% of all school-aged children in Western Australia at 162 schools and colleges.

For many years, CEWA has been pioneering the use of digital solutions to support a dynamic, student-centered approach to education. From iPads in the classroom to personalized, AI-enhanced learning experiences, the organization is always looking for innovative ways to incorporate the cutting-edge technology into its teaching.

Lee Swift, CISO at CEWA, said, “We see cloud-based services as a powerful way to offer students the benefits of the latest technology without sending our costs soaring. As part of that strategy, we’ve migrated most of the on-premises file shares and mail servers at our schools to Microsoft 365.”

Including students, teachers, and staff, CEWA now has more than 90,000 Microsoft 365 users and a total of more than 1 PB of data on the platform. The organization’s data volumes continue to expand — and CEWA must retain some of this data for more than 99 years for regulatory compliance purposes.

Mike Kovacevic, CIO at CEWA, said: “While short periods of downtime wouldn’t substantially impact our ability to teach, any data loss or data breaches could carry significant regulatory and reputational risk. Whether our data is stored on premises or in the cloud, it’s crucial that it’s secure and available.”

As its Microsoft 365 data grew year after year, CEWA recognized that the solution’s native backup capabilities were no longer able to deliver on its requirements for retention and recovery.

“We’ve seen education providers in Australia suffer cyberattacks that take months to recover from,” said Swift. “To mitigate our risk and maintain a strong compliance posture, we wanted to deliver enhanced protection for our Microsoft 365 accounts.”

For several years, CEWA has used Veeam Data Platform to help it protect over 60 VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V environments across more than 300 on-premises servers. Based on its positive experiences with Veeam, CEWA selected Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 to help it safeguard data in the cloud.

“From the very start of the relationship, Veeam has always gone out of their way to understand our strategic direction and give us what we need to achieve our goals,” said Kovacevic. “When we started the search for a data protection solution for Microsoft 365, Veeam knew exactly what we were looking for. And when we compared the features, market maturity and expert reviews of Veeam with solutions from other vendors, the best choice was clear.”

Working closely with Microsoft, Veeam helped CEWA rapidly configure the new solution and begin backing up its Microsoft 365 accounts in less than an hour.

“The setup process for Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 was incredible — I didn’t realize just how quick it would be,” said Swift. “With over 90,000 Microsoft 365 accounts to back up, we were anticipating a months-long project that would require a dedicated manager and project plan. In fact, getting set up with Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 took just 40 minutes. We were blown away by how easy it was.”

Kovacevic said: “Our Veeam deployment was so fast and smooth that we were able to bring forward other important digital initiatives. This included a project to centralize privacy and security impact assessments for new AI and edtech tools — eliminating the need for each individual school to duplicate this work themselves.”

With Veeam, CEWA can now retain its Microsoft 365 data indefinitely and recover it on demand. Equipped with these capabilities, the organization can meet the highest regulatory standards for data protection in Australia, including the ‘Essential Eight’ cybersecurity framework developed by the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC).

“Veeam gives us service-level immutable, encrypted Microsoft 365 backups combined with privileged access management capabilities — helping us mitigate the risk of cyberattacks,” said Swift. “From a single portal, we can now recover anything from individual emails to entire mailboxes with a couple of clicks.”

Looking ahead, CEWA plans to further streamline its approach to data protection by empowering IT managers at its schools to recover student data themselves. With Veeam, CEWA ensures that IT managers only have access to data within their own school. In addition, the organization gets a full audit trail of every recovery action for compliance and information security purposes.

As CEWA continues its cloud transformation, Veeam will remain a key partner. Swift said: “To further strengthen our data resilience, we’re now looking to adopt a multi-cloud strategy — storing a copy of our Microsoft 365 data with a second cloud provider. We’re looking forward to working with Veeam to make our multi-cloud vision a reality.”

• 40 minutes to deploy and configure the Veeam solution
  “With Veeam, we set up automated backup jobs for over 1 PB of Microsoft 365 data in under an hour,” said Swift. “Crucially, there was zero impact for our users during the migration process.”
• 50% faster recovery of Microsoft 365 data
  “Because we have such as massive Microsoft 365 environment, restoring data was never a quick job,” said Swift. “Using the Veeam solution, we can now recover files for our users in minutes.”
• 99+ years data retention, strengthening regulatory compliance
  With immutable, unlimited cloud storage from Veeam, CEWA ensures that its continuously growing Microsoft 365 data is always protected, secure, and accessible.