Case Study: The University of Manchester achieves 40-minute data refreshes and accelerated, GDPR-compliant app delivery with Delphix

The University Of Manchester Delivers A Digital Housing Experience For Staff And Students

The University of Manchester, one of the UK’s largest single-site universities with over 40,000 students and 12,800 staff, wanted to harness data and technology to deliver better digital services like a new student housing experience. Progress was hampered by two legacy IT estates, strict GDPR requirements, and slow, manual data provisioning—tasks that once took staff nearly a week to complete—creating a bottleneck for development and testing.

The university implemented Delphix’s DevOps data platform to virtualize and automate data delivery, exposing APIs so developers and testers could self-provision secure, production-like datasets. As a result, refresh times dropped from 16 days to about 40 minutes, DBAs were freed from routine tasks, release cycles shortened, storage needs fell, and the university plans to expand Delphix across more applications while masking over 130 million rows of sensitive data and accelerating cloud migration.

The University of Manchester

Adrian Britton

Test Delivery Manager and Innovation Lead