Xopero ONE wins backup speed tests

The Medical University of Warsaw is one of the oldest medical universities in Poland, which has been educating the best specialists in the industry for over 200 years. It has more than 4K employees and over 10K students get their medical education here. According to the latest ranking of the Best Global Universities, it’s among the top 4.4 percent of the finest educational institutions of the world, and it’s a leading medical school in Poland.

Because of the specificity of the industry and the growing interest in remote teaching trends, the Medical University of Warsaw has started dynamically developing e-services. The pandemic has forced the university's modern IT infrastructure to be tested and modernized to meet the needs of the students and the teaching staff. The University uses the Microsoft 365 package suite for both didactic purposes and the ongoing workflow of the scientific staff and administration.

The Medical University of Warsaw operates huge amounts of information, some of which includes: sensitive personal data, scientific studies, and educational materials from several organizational units. Usually, they share this data simply by email. Thus, the administration of the university wanted the Exchange application to run smoothly and to have the option of granular restore. In case of disaster scenario, unintentional deletion or any potential errors, they need to make sure to instantly restore only chosen messages and attachments. The protection of employee data and active files was another crucial factor.

Within the Shared Responsibility Model that Microsoft follows, the service provider is accountable for the security and availability of the entire service and infrastructure. In its turn, protection, including the data processed as part of the M365 packages, is mainly the responsibility of the user. Therefore, the university decided to find quick and highly efficient backup software for Microsoft 365 services.

Both university authorities and system administrators in the institution are aware of cyber threats. The risk of their occurrence is mentioned in the university's strategy and SWOT analysis for the upcoming years. Current statistics show that compared to other industries, the frequency of encryption attacks is much higher in the field of education. Additionally, it can take up to six months for educational institutions to decrypt critical data.

Bearing in mind the necessity to secure M365 data, the requirements and needs of the students and teaching staff, compliance with the Shared Responsibility Model, and risks of cyber threats, the University decided to look for a fast and efficient backup software for nearly 4K Microsoft 365 accounts.

Due to the complexity and size of the infrastructure, the system administrators of the University needed a friendly and flexible solution to implement fast and manage with ease. What’s more, this solution shouldn’t have been eating into administrators’ valuable time without overloading the institution’s IT infrastructure. And that was the reason why the Medical University of Warsaw stopped its glance at Xopero ONE Backup & Recovery for Microsoft 365.

The IT department of the University encountered a few backup and data restore solutions and decided to try them and test if they meet its needs. Xopero ONE beat all the competition, and stood out from others in processing the backup of the University’s several thousand accounts at the highest speed. At the same time, there were other metrics that influenced the decision-making process in favor of Xopero ONE, including the professionalism of the Customer Success department and technical consultations, as well as quick and direct contact with the team.

After Warsaw University made its final choice, the Proof of Concept (PoC) procedure started. Xopero engineers started the remote implementation, which was rather fast - it took only a few hours. Thanks to the ability to instant configuration of its own backup plan, the University quickly and efficiently set up the optimal policy to meet its challenges and protect thousands of M365 accounts at a time.

As a result, now the administrators at the Medical University of Warsaw have software that provides incomparable backup and recovery speed protecting large volumes of data and M365 mailboxes. At the same time, the efficient combination of compression and data deduplication allows the University to save space in its data storage.

Granular data recovery, as well as intuitive browsing and filtering of copies, are extremely helpful in everyday routine workflow. Thus, administrators may easily find the data they need to restore and recover only those specific items they need from the entire copy, such as individual emails. Accidental deletion of a file or email is no longer an issue for them (which is especially useful given the possibility of human error among the staff of nearly 4K people!).

The backup speed wasn’t the only crucial aspect that influenced the decision-making process. The Medical University of Warsaw also paid much attention to Xopero security features. We have already mentioned, that educational institutions are among those which are highly targeted by cybercriminals; therefore it is critical for the University to have appropriate procedures to respond to such incidents, and Disaster Recovery is among those crucial features.

As well as true Disaster Recovery Technology, the specialists from the IT department of the University distinguished Xopero’s ransomware protection package, which among other features includes immutable storage, the safest type of data storage on the market that permits to keep data in non-executable form. It means that even if ransomware hits the backup files, they won’t be executed in the storage and ransomware won’t be able to spread inside the storage.

The implementation of Xopero ONE Backup & Recovery met all the requirements and expectations of the Medical University of Warsaw. Among the competition, Xopero granted the fastest backup performance and recovery for several thousand M365 accounts. The administrators can easily manage backups thanks to the user-friendly interface and fully automated backup process, and thus, they can save their time and effort.

Now, after implementing Xopero ONE, the University has a guarantee that its M365, students, and teaching staff’s critical data is protected. Moreover, the institution managed to reduce and meet its obligations within the Shared Responsibility Model and ensure its business continuity with the ability to instantly restore its critical data in the fastest way among the tested solutions.