Case Study: Seattle University achieves rapid cloud migration, faster backups and cost savings with Cohesity

Seattle University Moves to the Cloud with Cohesity

Seattle University, a Jesuit institution with about 7,200 students and 2,000 staff, was rapidly shifting servers and services to the public cloud but struggled with fragmented SANs, complex shared-folder permissions, frequent recovery failures, and growing data (notably large media files). The IT team needed a reliable, cloud‑native secondary storage platform that simplified backup and recovery, supported dev/test use cases, and reduced cost and management overhead.

Seattle chose Cohesity (DataPlatform, DataProtect, CloudSpin) to replace its legacy backup stack, protect all virtual and physical servers, and integrate natively with AWS and Azure (with Exchange Online support planned). The result: backups shortened from hours to minutes, global deduplication delivered more than 60x logical capacity savings, CapEx/OpEx and maintenance costs dropped, IT staff were freed to focus on core operations, and CloudSpin enabled easy dev/test provisioning in the cloud while older data is moved to cloud tiering.

Seattle University

Aaron Boruff

Application Administrator