Leading the way in higher education with cyber resilience at scale

When technology modernization projects are shared across organizations, you’re going to see reduced costs, enhanced cyber resilience, and improved sustainability.

That was the goal for the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia’s (NRW); to boost productivity, efficiency and cyber resilience across education. Ready for the challenge, a pioneering university stepped up, ready to modernize its storage, backup and recovery environments. And in doing so, creating a scalable, as-a-service solution that could be used by other institutions in the region. 

That university was RWTH Aachen, one of ten German Universities of Excellence and a pioneer of research in quantum computing¹. They came to us, here at Hitachi Vantara, to help guide them through this modernization project.

Dr. Thomas Eifert, CTO at the IT Center of RWTH Aachen, said: “Previously, every university, department, and institute designed and operated their own backup and recovery processes and solutions.”

But with increasingly intelligent, unpredictable threats on the landscape, disparate and outdated processes leave universities open to risk.

Simplicity at scale…

“Our goal was to deliver fast and reliable self-service data restores,” continued Thomas Eifert. “Be it a small departmental server or a large university-wide system, we wanted to provide the same service levels and performance to all users.”

The result? A multi-layered data protection approach made up of one of the largest deployments of distributed object storage solution Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) and Hitachi Data Protection Suite, powered by Commvault. Providing data integrity and resilience across multiple locations.

The completely scalable, as-a-service solution means that any university within NRW can benefit from it—a huge cost and environmental win. It also means that even if an attack should happen, the data can be restored fast and without compromise.

The proof in the pudding

“Today, we’re backing up 7,000 systems, “said Thomas Eifert. “That’s about 4,500 at RWTH and another 2,500 from other universities. Many of the region’s other universities and higher education institutions are interested, so we’re expecting rapid growth.”

To get more details on the story, and for a deeper insight on the emerging trends in data protection and security—as well as how to avoid the potential pitfalls—hear Thomas Eifert join Howard Holton, CTO at GigaOm, and Tanya Loughlin, Director at Hitachi Vantara for a full discussion in our recent webinar.

Also, here you can see why Hitachi Vantara is the leader in Unstructured Data Management for the 4^th consecutive year according to GigaOm². Another example of the range of capabilities available to you here in One Hitachi.

¹ https://www.rwth-aachen.de/cms/root/Die-RWTH/Aktuell/Pressemitteilungen/April-2024/~bhecmu/Datenverarbeitung-stoesst-in-neue-Dimens/lidx/1/

² https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/ext/gigaom-rates-hcp-unstructured-data-management