Protecting knowledge: Uniandes powers uninterrupted education with Veeam data resilience

As Uniandes expanded its degree programs to include continuing education and professional learning offerings, always-available access to digital services became even more essential. Students, faculty, researchers, and staff rely on data around the clock, making resilience critical to both the learning experience and the university's long-term competitiveness.

"The pace of change across industries continues to accelerate, making it increasingly important for people to keep their skills up to date," said Luis Alejandro Rojas Gómez, Head of Technology Infrastructure, Information and Technology Services Directorate at Universidad de los Andes. "To meet this need, we're offering more continuing education courses, recertifications, and training while continually updating our curriculum to reflect the latest industry developments."

The university's ambition to build lifelong relationships with learners depends on reliable access to student information systems and digital learning platforms.

"Data underpins the lifelong relationships with students that we're seeking to cultivate," said Rojas Gómez. "Any issues affecting our student information systems could prevent users from registering for courses or receiving their schedules. Since we're now competing with institutions around the world, we cannot afford disruptions that impact the student experience."

Those risks became a reality when the university experienced a cyberattack. While existing tools protected data, the incident exposed recovery processes that were slow, manual, and unable to support the university's future ambitions.

"Experiencing a cyberattack revealed just how slow and manual our recovery processes were and pushed us into action. We wanted a more agile solution that would enable rather than limit our future options", said Rojas Gómez.

To strengthen cyber resilience and support uninterrupted education, Uniandes selected Veeam and worked with a trusted partner, TI724, to design and deploy its new data protection platform.

"TI724 is a strategic implementation partner for Universidad de los Andes, so we always take their advice on board," said Rojas Gómez. "Together, we identified Veeam as the best fit for our needs, providing the comprehensive data protection and agile recovery tools we were looking for."

The joint implementation team deployed backup and replication capabilities across the university's hybrid multi-cloud environment.

"We have services running on premises, in Microsoft Azure, and in AWS," said Rojas Gómez. "Veeam integrates seamlessly with all of these, which reduces complexity dramatically. We've been able to find connectors and dedicated services very easily."

Beyond protecting workloads, Veeam also gives the university greater flexibility to move and copy data securely between environments, accelerating development projects while reducing operational costs.

"An added benefit of Veeam is data portability," said Rojas Gómez. "We now use Veeam to move and copy data between platforms with minimal risk, which speeds up development and slashes our costs."

Today, automated recovery enables the IT team to restore services dramatically faster, thus reducing operational friction and eliminating manual effort while improving the experience for students, researchers, faculty, and staff.

"Previously, it would take us as between 24 and 36 hours to recover data, whereas we can do it in between three and 24 hours with Veeam, depending on the service involved," said Rojas Gómez. "Our users can get back to work much sooner. Veeam helped us drive down the risk of data loss by moving from backups aged three to nine days to one to six days. We feel far more confident in our ability to protect data across multiple platforms and recover quickly from major incidents such as cyberattacks. Both Veeam and TI724 exceeded our expectations and have given us the foundations to deliver the next generation of higher education."

• Up to 90% reduction in data recovery times
  Compared with its previous solution, Veeam dramatically accelerates recovery, which enables Uniandes to restore services in 3-24 hours rather than 24-36 hours, representing an improvement of 70-90%. Automated, regularly tested recovery processes give the university confidence in its speed and capability, strengthening its readiness for cyberattacks and other major disruptions.
• Enables data resilience and portability across hybrid multi-cloud environments
  Veeam protects workloads across on-premises infrastructure, Microsoft Azure, and AWS while enabling the secure movement of data between platforms, which reduces complexity, development time, and operational costs.
• Keeps students, faculty, researchers, and staff productive
  "With Veeam, we can ensure outstanding levels of resilience for our data no matter where it is located," said Rojas Gómez. "By empowering users with the data they need 24/7, Veeam helps students, researchers, faculty, and staff get the most out of every day, making us an unbeatable destination for learning."