Powering knowledge: Sheffield Hallam University builds resilient digital services with Veeam

Sheffield Hallam has long been recognized for high-quality teaching, strong employability outcomes, and outstanding support. To build on its reputation as one of the best places to study and conduct research in the UK, it continues to invest in cutting-edge facilities and online teaching platforms.

“Our mission is to empower students, staff, and researchers with the digital tools they need to do the best work they can,” said Simon Henry, Head of Cloud, Networks, and Infrastructure at Sheffield Hallam University. “To support this, we are always optimizing our technology estate to ensure that we’re getting the best value for money without limiting innovation.”

After adopting a secure-by-design ethos, Sheffield Hallam looked to address the gaps in its data resilience strategy, especially as it evolved its IT environment.

“We have been in a process of transitioning our technology posture to adopt a cloud first approach to digital delivery,” said Simon Henry. “Amongst other areas this has included leveraging Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure to a greater extent across our environment. Ensuring that this data is well protected and easy to recover is key to our success and ability to deliver services for users. We created a wish list of features that our previous data resilience solution didn’t offer, which included role-based access control (RBAC), immutable backups, and centralized governance. Our goal was to transform our approach to data resilience, so it became an enabler of, rather than an obstacle to, innovation.”

Sheffield Hallam chose Veeam to build a resilient, unified foundation for data protection, one that keeps knowledge flowing around the clock, and removes the operational complexity that had slowed the team down. The university worked with partner MTI to select and design the solution.

“Veeam ticked every box on our checklist of requirements,” said Simon Henry. “We narrowed down our choices to Veeam versus Rubrik, and Veeam won the day because it was better priced and more flexible. The lack of vendor lock-in with Veeam was a major win for us. MTI worked closely with us to understand our systems and processes, before helping us refine the solution configuration to take full advantage of the exceptional visibility and control offered by Veeam.”

Using a combination of platform- and agent-based backups, Sheffield Hallam uses Veeam to protect data across its on-premises IT environment. The university stores multiple copies of data at its data centers and in Veeam Vault: A fully managed, secure cloud storage resource with predictable, all-inclusive pricing.

“The environment protected by Veeam is varied,” said Simon Henry. “It includes everything from research applications to systems that control lights in our campus buildings. Veeam can handle it all; we simply point it at the data and go. Even though Veeam includes some highly sophisticated capabilities under the hood, the user interface is strikingly simple to use. Having an additional copy of our data in Veeam Vault is our belt-and-braces measure and gives us incredible peace of mind.”

That simplicity is by design. Veeam Data Platform is built to remove operational friction, giving Sheffield Hallam's team more time to focus on strategic work rather than managing their data protection environment.

As part of its unified resilience platform, Sheffield Hallam extended Veeam to cover its Microsoft environment, deploying Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 and Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft Entra ID.

“Adopting Veeam Data Cloud for our Microsoft environment was a really smooth experience,” said Simon Henry. “Our in-house Microsoft technology specialists were really impressed with having a purpose-built data resilience solution and had immediate confidence in Veeam. Veeam Data Cloud fits in perfectly with our secure-by-design strategy, as we know Veeam has embedded security in every layer of the architecture.”

To get the most from the full Veeam platform, Sheffield Hallam also engaged Veeam Technical Account Manager (TAM) services.

“Our Veeam TAM had worked in higher education before, which meant our terminology required no translation from the get-go,” said Simon Henry. “Not only has our TAM helped us overcome the usual complexities that come with adopting a new solution, but they’ve also supported us in winning over stakeholders. They provide a valuable point of reference outside the business for ratifying the decisions we’re making around data governance and more.”

Since deploying Veeam, Sheffield Hallam has succeeded in recovering data 99.9% of the time and boosted backup speed significantly. The university benefits from greater data resilience thanks to built-in features such as immutability and malware scanning.

“With Veeam we had full confidence in backup and restores from day one, allowing us to recover our data with ease and support users across the university,” said Simon Henry. “Our largest workload backs up 2.8x or 80% faster with Veeam, while some agent-based backups complete 13.7x faster than before. Our average data processing rate through Veeam is 473 MB/s, putting us in a very strong position for both resilience and performance. Veeam automatically flags backups that may have been compromised, which is helping us move to a more proactive cybersecurity stance. By doubling up on immutability through Veeam and our storage, we can be certain of our data’s integrity.”

Sheffield Hallam is now exploring data portability through Veeam, and the possibility of extending its Veeam implementation to cover workloads in the cloud too.

“Whether we choose to switch hypervisor or adopt hyper-converged infrastructure, we know Veeam will provide the same level of outstanding data resilience with minimal complexity,” said Simon Henry. “We’re looking into using Veeam to move data between platforms. We might also bring our Azure workloads into Veeam, which will give us a single point of control for data resilience for our hybrid IT environment. Our experience of working with Veeam so far has been enriching and we look forward to seeing where we go next on our journey together.”

• 99.9% success recovering data and 80% faster backups for complex workloads
  Sheffield Hallam boosted data recovery success and backup speeds with Veeam, backed by automated verification that proves recoverability before disaster strikes. That provable resilience gives the IT team confidence in their own environment and the evidence they need to satisfy auditors and stakeholders alike.
• Ramps up cyber resilience with built-in immutability and malware scanning
  “Veeam automatically flags backups that may have been compromised, which is helping us move to a more proactive cybersecurity stance,” said Simon Henry. “By doubling up on immutability through Veeam and our storage, we can be certain of our data’s integrity.”
• Drives innovation with zero vendor lock-in
  Sheffield Hallam can build on Veeam flexibility to adapt its IT environment without worrying that it will compromise new levels of data resilience.