The University of Manchester has deployed Veeam Data Cloud to protect 1.35 petabytes of data across its Microsoft 365 environment — including 28,000 mailboxes, 26,000 OneDrive accounts, and nearly 14,000 SharePoint sites — after determining that Microsoft's own resilience tools could not guarantee recovery of significant data volumes.
The university's decision to add third-party backup sits within a broader digital transformation programme that is migrating staff and student data from shared drives to Microsoft OneDrive. That migration creates a concentration of sensitive research material in a single cloud environment, making recovery capability a critical dependency.
"Moving to Microsoft 365 is a big opportunity to streamline the way we deliver a key service to our stakeholders, but it also created a new challenge," said Paul Kelly, Project Manager in the Strategic Change Office at the University of Manchester. "Microsoft provides some great resilience and compliance tools aiding in data retention and management. However, we knew it would be extremely risky to put ourselves in the position of being completely reliant upon that capability if we ever needed to restore a significant volume of data."
The Veeam deployment covers SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams, with all data encrypted in transit and at rest — a requirement the university flagged as non-negotiable given the sensitivity of its research outputs. The university completed its first full backup within the initial deployment window, with Kelly noting data transfer rates exceeded what the institution had seen during a prior Microsoft 365 migration.
Service desk training time has been kept to one hour per employee, which matters for an institution that turns over support staff regularly. The university is now exploring extending Veeam coverage to on-premises environments.
The case illustrates a recurring pattern across higher education: Microsoft 365 adoption accelerates, the built-in recovery tools prove adequate for routine deletions but insufficient for bulk restore scenarios, and institutions reach for a backup layer. At 44,000 students and a research portfolio generating regulated intellectual property, Manchester's exposure is larger than most.
