Ipswich Grammar School moves to Druva for a cloud built backup solution

Ipswich Grammar School is the oldest grammar school in Queensland, Australia and a Prep to Year 12 independent day and boarding school. Founded in 1863, IGS has the distinction of being the first secondary school in Queensland and the first grammar school. Located in the heritage city of Ipswich, many of its school buildings are listed on the Queensland Heritage Register and the National Trust of Australia.

Ipswich Grammar School leverages information communication technologies to deliver dynamic and interactive curriculum to its 1000 students, which means it has large volumes of educational related data running through its systems, as well as personal student data that needed to adhere to government regulations.

Being a forward thinking, innovative institution, the school saw the changing landscape of the way data was being protected and managed and made the decision to begin its journey to the cloud, starting with its Microsoft Exchange environment, then moving to its data centers.

They were previously using Veeam on-premises for data protection of multiple enterprise workloads. But as they began to migrate Microsoft Exchange to Office 365, they needed an alternative solution that was a backup solution built for the cloud without a suite of separate products — and where storage was part of the total solution — not separate.

“We did a trial of Veeam’s Office 365 deployment and learned we would have had to purchase and deploy multiple products to manage data center workloads and Office 365, as Veeam doesn’t provide a single pane of glass,” said David Peace, Network and Security Administrator at Ipswich Grammar School. “Then we would have had to find a cloud partner to store our data offsite.”

To facilitate the school’s cloud strategy, David wanted one platform to protect and manage all of its data for very long retention periods. After learning about the Druva Cloud Platform from partner Aliva, David immediately saw what differentiated Druva: the ability to achieve data protection and management for Office 365 email and many other physical and virtual data center workloads through a cloud-native approach.

As a 100% SaaS platform built on AWS, Druva enables Ipswich Grammar School to do cloud-to-cloud backup for Office 365, as well as incremental backups for other data sources without ever needing to do a full second backup. For the school, this is delivering far more efficiencies than Veeam with faster performance.

The Druva Cloud Platform delivers comprehensive and secure backup, recovery, and archival for Exchange Online and our virtual environment. We’ve also done some backups and successful recovery on some of our older file storage,” David added.

One of the biggest differentiators compared to Veeam is Druva’s single control plane, which enables IT to easily recover server data down to the file level and restore deleted emails fast. Additionally, Druva’s global scale-out deduplication not only reduces bandwidth, but it also lowers storage costs, as customers only pay for data stored, post global deduplication, in the cloud.

“Druva Cloud Platform is easy to navigate on the fly. We’ve had a few users accidentally delete their data and we’ve been able to quickly recover deleted files/emails and restore it to the folder in seconds,” said David.

“The big win for us also came from the SaaS model that Druva provides. One of the things it enabled us to do was to reduce TCO through long-term data storage retention. A massive cost reduction for us,” he added.

Ipswich Grammar School was able to benefit from not having to update hardware every three years for its backup needs. The infrastructure in place couldn’t support long-term backups without significant outlay in hardware, making Druva and the cloud SaaS model a more long-term data protection solution.

“With Druva we don’t have to worry about maintenance, product and server updates, and upkeep as we did with an onsite solution,” he said.

Onboarding 180 users to Office 365 was done easily via Active Directory. “We didn’t need a team with backup skills or a managed service provider to onboard users, which enabled us to redeploy IT resources to focus on strategic business priorities. Because we don’t have to do capacity management, maintenance or complex procurement our IT response rates are better, as is our IT-business relationship,” added David.

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