Data resilience underpins our wider Digital Transformation ambitions. As we’ ve increased our use of cloud services, we’ ve needed to ensure that the data supporting teaching, research, collaboration and administration is protected and recoverable across a hybrid environment. Data resilience gives us the confidence to adopt new technologies and modernise services, knowing that we can maintain availability and recover quickly if needed. Ultimately, we see resilience as an enabler of innovation rather than a barrier to it.

What were the key challenges you were looking to address by modernising the university’ s backup and recovery capabilities?

Our previous backup platform had served us well, but our requirements had evolved. We wanted to strengthen our cyber-resilience, improve recovery confidence and gain better visibility across the estate. We were also looking for capabilities such as immutable backups, role-based access controls, stronger governance and improved reporting. Perhaps most importantly, we wanted greater assurance that we could recover services quickly and effectively in the event of an incident.

How important are immutable backups and role-based access controls in strengthening the university’ s cyber-resilience?

They are extremely important. Immutable backups provide confidence that our recovery data remains protected and cannot be altered or deleted, even in a worst-case scenario. Role-based access controls help ensure that people only have access to the functions they need, supporting both security and governance requirements. Together, these capabilities form a key part of our secure-by-design approach and help us maintain a strong cyberresilience posture.

Your environment supports everything from research applications to campus building systems. How do you ensure consistent protection across such a diverse range of workloads?

Higher education environments are incredibly diverse, so flexibility is important. Our approach is to apply consistent resilience principles while using the most appropriate protection method for each workload. We use a combination of platform-based and agent-based backups to protect everything from research applications and virtual infrastructure through to operational systems that support the campus. By combining this with multiple copies of data, immutability and centralised management, we can deliver a consistent level of protection and recovery confidence across the estate.

What impact has the new data protection platform had on your IT team’ s ability to support students, staff and researchers while maintaining operational efficiency?

The biggest impact has been increased confidence and reduced operational overhead. The platform gives us better visibility into our environment and automates many of the routine tasks associated with backup management, allowing our teams to focus on delivering value elsewhere. We’ ve also seen significant improvements in backup performance and recovery assurance, which means we can support students, staff and researchers knowing that critical data and services can be restored quickly when needed.

The biggest impact has been increased confidence and reduced operational overhead.

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