Liverpool John Moores University in UK Chooses Veeam

Veeam Software, Inc. announced that Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), one of the largest public universities in the UK, has replaced its backup software with its Availability Suite to improve data protection.

Veeam backups and replicates reliably, verifies recoverability and recovers in minutes. The vendor also offers additional ransomware protection in the form of immutable backups on-premises and off-premises. Furthermore, its solution is more affordable than legacy backup and easier to use, saving the university £150,000 over 5 years and 4 weeks of backup management time annually.

“Data drives education, so protecting data is our top priority,” said Mark Smith, senior operations officer, LJMU. “Veeam is consistently reliable and so easy to use – it’s the best fit for us.“

He said the money saved with Veeam enabled the university to invest in new technology including Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365:”The decision to extend Veeam protection to Office 365 was obvious because Microsoft doesn’t offer comprehensive backup, and since we currently have hybrid Exchange and OneDrive environments, we don’t want to lose access to historical emails, OneDrive files and Teams’ data while we transition to the cloud. Teams’ data grew during the pandemic as students, faculty and staff worked remotely, so protecting it is critical.“

Microsoft Office 365 is the university’s first step in its cloud journey, and the next step may be Azure. Veeam offers native Azure backup and recovery, as well as direct restore, which would restore the university’s on-premises IT infrastructure to Azure for DR.

“One of the things we like best about Veeam is easy cloud integration, so we’re also considering Veeam’s immutable backups in cloud object storage to strengthen ransomware protection,” Smith said. “In the meantime, we activated Veeam’s Possible Ransomware Alarm to alert us to abnormal activity on each VM.“

He said the team also appreciates Veeam licensing because it’s simple and portable. Any workload can be backed up across any environment. For now, Veeam backups and replicates 150TB across 310 VMs (and a few physical servers) on-premises and to DR sites.

Rick Williams, operations officer, LJMU, deployed Veeam. He said he realized the university had been missing out on helpful and beneficial functionality such as DataLabs to verify the recoverability of backups and replicas (via SureBackup and SureReplica), Instant VM Recovery to recover whole VMs quickly and Veeam Explorers for Exchange and Oracle for fast granular recovery. This functionality, combined with reliable backup that doesn’t require extensive management, saves the IT team approximately 4 weeks annually.

“To be honest, what’s most helpful about Veeam is being able to set it and forget about it,” Williams said. “Our team is relatively small, so we don’t have extra time to look after backups. Legacy backup required extra time and resources that don’t exist, making it more of a burden than a benefit. Veeam is the opposite – it’s helpful because it monitors backups and alerts us if there’s an issue, which happens rarely, but if there is an issue, it’s usually a configuration problem on our part. My point is that Veeam has supported us from the start, beginning with after-sales help. We didn’t even know who our sales contact was for legacy backup. Having a positive relationship with a vendor that is actually helpful is a massive benefit.“

Case study: Veeam excels at Liverpool John Moores University with data protection for students, faculty and staff and ransomware defense.