From risk to resilience: How the University of Manchester safeguarded its Microsoft 365 estate

The University of Manchester is a center of teaching excellence, world-class research, outstanding student experience, and social responsibility. It’s also a part of the UK’s prestigious Russell Group of universities.

Each year, the university welcomes 44,000+ students to its campus. This community includes thousands of postgraduate researchers working in a wide range of fields, including cutting-edge research projects.

“To better support our students, staff, and faculties, we’re aiming to transform our digital capabilities,” said Paul Kelly, Project Manager in the Strategic Change Office at the University of Manchester. “One of our most important goals is to create inclusive, people-led digital environments. We will expand access locally and globally. Building digital skills for all, tackling digital poverty and using AI responsibly, we’ll use technology to empower rather than exclude.”

To support their digital transformation initiative, the University of Manchester is embracing Microsoft 365. As well as offering anywhere, anytime access to key productivity apps, the transition to Microsoft 365 will enable the university to migrate data from shared drives to Microsoft OneDrive repositories. This will enhance governance and security for sensitive intellectual property.

“Moving to Microsoft 365 is a big opportunity to streamline the way we deliver a key service to our stakeholders, but it also created a new challenge,” said Kelly. “Microsoft provides some great resilience and compliance tools aiding in data retention and management. However, we knew it would be extremely risky to put ourselves in the position of being completely reliant upon that capability if we ever needed to restore a significant volume of data.”

To enable resilience for its Microsoft 365 environment, the University of Manchester turned to Veeam. With Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365, the organization can ensure comprehensive data availability, integrity, and security for all its apps, including SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams.

“During our selection, we confirmed with Gartner that Veeam is the industry leader for data resilience,” said Kelly. “From the very first time we engaged with the Veeam team, they’ve always gone above and beyond to help us. While other vendors were not always easy to engage, Veeam gave us immediate access to responsive and engaged people on both the commercial and technical side.”

Another key factor in selecting the Veeam SaaS data resilience solution was its security and cost-efficiency.

“All our data is encrypted in transit and at rest, which was a critical requirement given the sensitivity of our research,” said Kelly. “In common with all HE institutions, finding a cost-effect solution was important to us. With Veeam, we get unlimited storage for a competitive, transparent monthly fee.”

Working closely with Veeam, the University of Manchester completed its first full backup of Microsoft 365, including 28,000 mailboxes, 26,000+ OneDrive accounts, nearly 14,000 SharePoint sites, and almost 12,000 Teams sites and channels.

“Getting started with Veeam was seamless, and we were impressed by how fast the first backup was,” said Kelly. “The data transport rates were significantly faster than a previous data migration into Microsoft 365 and we experienced no disruption to our end users. Veeam knows Microsoft 365 inside out, and those insights really helped us in setting up our backup schedules and monitoring.”

“On a personal level, I was delighted with the support we received from our Veeam Customer Success Manager,” adds Kelly. “Her clear and empathetic communication makes complex topics easy to understand, she responded to potential issues quickly, and she delivered excellent training for our teams that was very well-received.”

With Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365, the University of Manchester’s service desk teams can perform granular restores with ease, helping stakeholders get access to accidentally deleted data faster than ever.

“Veeam is really easy to use,” said Kelly. “After just an hour of training, we can have new members of our support desk team ready to start helping students, staff, and faculty."

The University of Manchester has now been using Veeam for a year, and the solution has never missed a beat.

“One thing that impresses me is how seamlessly Veeam deploys its security updates,” said Kelly. “We’ve gone through several updates now, and every single time our backup jobs have resumed with no issues”

With Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365, the University of Manchester has a proven recovery capability for its Microsoft 365 data. Looking ahead, the organization plans to build on its success with Veeam.

“We’re currently exploring a solution to better protect our on-premises environments. We are looking forward to working with Veeam on this added level of resilience.”

• Protects 1.35 PB of data, including sensitive intellectual property
  The University of Manchester is rounding out its data resilience strategy with Veeam to support outstanding experiences for students, staff, and faculty, helping to maintain its stellar reputation.
• New service desk employees trained on Veeam in just one hour
  With an easy-to-use interface, the university can help new service desk employees use Veeam proficiently with minimal time and effort.
• Enables rapid, granular file restores for end users
  Service desk teams can restore accidentally deleted files at the click of a button, improving the digital experience for students and faculty alike.