Case Study: University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership achieves sub‑2‑hour backups and business continuity with Arcserve UDP

University of Cambridge Institute safeguards reputation and business continuity with Arcserve

The University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), a 53‑person self-financing institute working with government, NGOs and businesses on sustainability leadership, faced growing data-protection challenges after moving to a Citrix XenServer virtual environment. Existing backups were slow and unreliable — overnight tapes took more than 18 hours, disk backups only held two weeks of data, and limited IT resources made recovery and tape restores time-consuming, risking disruption to high‑profile programmes and stakeholders.

CISL deployed Arcserve Unified Data Protector to protect 2.5TB across 1 physical and 22 virtual servers, using automated incremental backups, replication to the main data centre and offsite virtual standby servers, plus dashboard monitoring and alerts. The solution cut the overnight backup window from 18+ hours to under 2 hours, provides up to 90 days of incremental backups (greatly reducing tape restores), saves about 20 minutes of daily monitoring, and enables fast recovery and business continuity for the institute’s programmes and reputation.

Cambridge’s Institute for Sustainability Leadership

Ellis Karim

IT Manager