Prepared for anything: CQUniversity protects critical systems against cyber threats and natural disasters with Veeam

CQUniversity operates campuses in Adelaide, Brisbane, Bundaberg, Cairns, Emerald, Gladstone, Mackay, Melbourne, Rockhampton, Sydney and Townsville and also works in direct partnership with regional university centers, helping to ensure that no matter where students are located, they have the opportunity to engage in world-class higher education. The university is embracing digital transformation: bringing online student services together into an enhanced digital portal and adopting analytics to help uncover ways to boost student retention and attainment.

“Our developers need fast access to systems to move our transformation projects forward, but we also have to maintain high levels of information security and data governance,” said Slater . “This is challenging because we use a wide range of on-premises platforms, as well as cloud services like Azure Fabric. Cybersecurity and data resilience rank highly on our list of priorities.”

Previously, CQUniversity used a manual toolset to back up and restore its systems, comprising around 1.6 PB of data across VMware virtual machines (VMs), physical servers and hyperscalers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. 

Kerrod Wells, Senior Systems Engineer at CQUniversity, said: “Over the years, our environment has shifted away from individual physical servers and towards virtual environments. Today, we have around 400 VMs across our estate, and our previous tool hadn’t kept pace with that change. We had a good relationship with the previous vendor but unfortunately we couldn’t see them growing with us. We were running backup agents on every single VM, which meant a lot of extra management work.”  

To streamline its data protection processes and enhance cyber-resilience across an evolving environment, CQUniversity looked for a new solution. “With our previous tools, recovering from a disaster would have been all the more stressful,” said Slater . “Before, it would have taken months of work to clean up our data and restore our systems. We looked for a trusted partner to help us guard against that kind of scenario.”

CQUniversity took a bold new approach to data resilience, powered by Veeam. By automating data protection workflows met all the university’s key selection criteria. The solution ensures CQUniversity can bounce back quickly from natural disasters like Cyclone Marcia, which nearly crippled its systems in 2015. With a solid resilience strategy now in place, the university is prepared to maintain continuity across campuses in Sydney, Melbourne, and remote locations—keeping operations smooth and recovery swift, even in the face of disruption.

“We first chose Veeam because we were confident it offered the best combination of value and functionality,” said Slater. “Eight years and several renewals later, we continue to see Veeam as our platform of choice for data resilience.”

To protect its mission-critical systems, CQUniversity has configured Veeam Data Platform to back up data to multiple targets, including its data center in Rockhampton, Queensland and a tertiary site in Sydney, New South Wales. Today, the university uses the solution to protect core services including its Microsoft Active Directory environment, its Microsoft SQL Server databases, its DNS and DHCP servers, its on-prem customer relationship management environment, its learning management system (LMS) and its HR and payroll applications.

“We back up the majority of our tier-zero services daily and run hourly backups for some of our critical database services,” said Wells. “Between our scheduled backups and copy jobs, Veeam is in near-constant use at CQUniversity.”

By harnessing automation from Veeam, CQUniversity can increase the coverage of its backups while reducing the time and effort it spends on data protection tasks overall.

“We’re covering a larger number of systems more thoroughly and intricately, but despite that I’m spending around 10% less time on backup-related activities,” said Wells . “I don’t think I would have been brave enough to try and update our previous tool by myself, but Veeam makes the process seamless.”

With Veeam, CQUniversity can recover faster than ever. “We’ve been fortunate to have avoided any external threats since we’ve had Veeam, but we have used the solution to resolve internal issues on a few occasions,” said Slater . “When one of our critical database servers ran out of disk, we needed to reload it quickly. Veeam made that easy. And whenever we’ve needed it, we’ve found that Instant Recovery performs exactly as advertised.”

To further strengthen its security posture, CQUniversity has recently started using Veeam Data Cloud Vault, a fully managed, always immutable, secure cloud storage platform built on a zero-trust architecture.

“Veeam Data Cloud Vault is a big advantage, as it allows us to deliver full immutability for our mission-critical apps, stored off-site,” says Wells . “We’ve also been very impressed by how fast it is to stand up some of our core systems using backups in Veeam Data Cloud Vault.” 

Looking ahead, CQUniversity is preparing to further enhance its data resiliency by adopting Linux hardened repositories.

“Adding immutability to our primary backup destination will give us a valuable extra layer of protection,” said Slater . “We plan to work with Veeam to set up hardened repositories when we carry out the next upgrade of our storage repository. One of the best things about working with Veeam is we never feel like we’re on our own — the help we need is always just a phone call or an email away.”

• Cuts time spent on data protection by 10% while expanding backup coverage
  With automation from Veeam, CQUniversity can protect a greater number of its systems while keeping its IT team lean and efficient.
• Delivers uncompromising resilience for 1.6PB of data across CQUniversity's hybrid infrastructure
  CQUniversity delivers data resilience across its hybrid platform with Veeam, safeguarding enterprise applications while ensuring compliance with information and data security regulations.
• Strengthens cyber-defenses with immutable cloud-based backups
  CQUniversity uses Veeam Data Cloud Vault to create air-gapped and immutable backups of its mission-critical systems, mitigating the potential impact of cyberattacks.