The challenge at ASU, as with any university, is to protect a wide variety of valuable data that might include proprietary research, long-term records, administrative files and course materials accessed by a diverse group of students, faculty and staff, and to do so with an IT staff with a wide range of expertise, from beginners to experienced workers.

Jake Bruner, from the Technology Services team, provides field services and desktop support functions. Over a year ago, the ASU IT department was looking for a solution to provide consistent and dependable data backup and recovery, as the university has a four-year device refresh cycle. During the refresh process, the university would back up each device to a network drive, which would then be backed up to tape, a process that took 5 to 6 hours per device. ASU implemented Druva inSync to simplify backup and recovery during the refresh process, drastically reducing initial backup time to 90 minutes per machine. This dramatic reduction in time required has freed up IT staff, enabling them to be more efficient, and to focus on other assignments.