Zero disruption, maximum achievement: University of North Texas System powers education with Veeam

UNT System is driven by a commitment to innovation and excellence, with faculty, staff, and students working together to push boundaries in education and research. Supporting this vibrant community is the university system’s IT team, which ensures every digital system — from learning platforms to administrative tools — runs smoothly and securely.

To safeguard operations and maintain confidence in its data protection, UNT System prioritized strengthening its IT resilience. The university aimed to prevent disruptions, boost efficiency, and meet rigorous regulatory standards.

“We need to comply with a wide range of regulations around data management,” said Kane. “In the current climate, ransomware is no longer an abstract worry but a very real threat. Our goal was to find a data resilience solution that helped us meet our regulatory obligations and gave us greater peace of mind that we were protected against any incident — from a user accidentally deleting some data to a major cyberattack.”

After evaluating several options, the university system felt that Veeam best met its needs for functionality, cost-efficiency, and cybersecurity. With Veeam, UNT System is turning its vision of true data resilience into reality.

“We went straight to Gartner’s magic quadrant and found Veeam firmly in the top right,” said Sean Flowers, Systems Engineer, Enterprise Systems Engineering Group at UNT System. “The seamless integration between Veeam and Pure Storage was another factor in our decision. With Veeam, there’s no vendor lock-in, which opens up so many options going forward. Veeam Data Platform offers flexibility at a really appealing price point, which is a winning combination for a higher education organization like ours that needs to maximize every dollar.”

UNT System uses Veeam to back up more than 600 VMware vSphere virtual machines (VMs) and nearly 2 PB of file share data. The university stores backups at both its primary and secondary data centers and is now cultivating a small footprint in the Microsoft Azure cloud.

“Veeam provides UNT System with consistent data protection across on-premises and cloud environments, giving the team flexibility to support Azure workloads where appropriate without being locked into a single platform or architecture,” said Kane. “For example, we’ve traditionally used native tools to back up workloads in Azure, but I know I’ve got Veeam capabilities at my fingertips. And if we ever choose to make a significant change to our IT environment — such as moving to a different hypervisor — we know Veeam will not only support that move but also provide data portability to help facilitate it.”

Since adopting Veeam, the UNT System IT team has seen measurable gains in its operational efficiency and data resilience. Backup management is simpler, compliance reporting is faster, significant cost savings are being recognized, and daily stress levels are dramatically lower.

“I have 95% less daily stress with Veeam than I did before,” said Flowers. “It’s so much easier to apply security patches and scale Veeam than previous solutions I’ve used. As a public higher-education institution, UNT System operates within a complex regulatory and audit environment, making reliable reporting, data integrity, and rapid recovery essential. We can easily manage data resilience and pull reports from Veeam to meet these obligations, allowing me to focus more of my time on value-added tasks than ever before.”

Kane added: “Standardizing on Veeam has saved us significantly. We never stop evaluating what’s out there in the market and recently found that an alternative solution with integrated backup technologies was astronomically more expensive than Veeam. The business case for Veeam just makes sense.”

UNT can now recover data faster with Veeam and has gained unprecedented confidence in its ability to maintain continuous data availability, integrity, and security.

“It’s safe to say that we’re achieving true data resilience with Veeam,” said Kane. “We put Veeam to the test almost every day, and it never fails us, allowing us to secure data like never before and recover it in minutes.”

• Improves cost efficiency by 30% compared to prior data protection approaches
  Veeam continues to deliver a rapid return on investment for UNT System and compares favorably to competing options in the marketplace. 
• Facilitates data recovery in minutes
  By enabling the UNT System IT team to recover data faster than ever before, Veeam helps to deliver exceptional user experiences to students, faculty, and staff members. 
• Enables outstanding data availability, integrity, and security
  UNT System is realizing its vision of true data resilience with Veeam, helping to ensure that the university is prepared for anything.