14 September 2015

City University London will work with Veeam Software and its partner Phoenix (now part of the Daisy Group) to help enable round the clock access to data and applications for its 18,000 students, while driving down backup and recovery costs by more than 30 per cent.

Veeam says the Enterprise Plus edition of its Availability Suite provides City’s students with a secure on and off-campus access to their data. The firm adds that it will also improve restoration functionality in the event of IT downtime.

As part of an ongoing refresh and upgrade, the university said it decided to upgrade its Veeam license from the Standard to Enterprise Plus offering as it provides “unrivalled” faster recovery times and point objectives of less than 15 minutes for applications and data. 

It will also benefit from the software’s self-service feature which enables the helpdesk to restore guest files, mailbox items and databases back to the main server with a single click via a web user interface.

With the introduction of tuition fees and the increased digitisation of learning resources, City University’s deputy CTO Eric McIntosh says education institutions are facing many constant and varying challenges. 

“One of the most pertinent is that both students and staff are demanding a more effective IT infrastructure to meet their needs,” says McIntosh. “To ensure future success and user satisfaction, we needed to adapt our IT in order to meet the expectations of students and staff. Enterprise Plus addresses the fundamental needs of the competitive higher education sector, allowing us to be always-on and cost-effective. It also provides us with a scalable roadmap that ties into our longer term objectives.”

The three-year deal represents Veeam’s first public sector enterprise licence agreement in the UK. It also forms part of an established relationship with City, managed by Phoenix, to improve the quality of IT infrastructure and support services to its users. 

Olivier Robinne, VP EMEA of Veeam Software, says: “It is no longer enough for higher education institutions to simply ‘have’ learning materials – however good they are – as they must be constantly available to students at anytime, anywhere.”