Case Study: The University of Manchester achieves 50% cost reduction and protects VMware Cloud on AWS with Druva

The University of Manchester protects VMware Cloud on AWS and reduces costs by 50%

The University of Manchester, a major research institution undergoing a £1 billion modernization, moved growing on‑premises VMware workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS but found its legacy on‑premises backup solution would be costly and inefficient for cloud protection—requiring large network overhead and significant scale‑up to cover ~200 new VMs per year. Extending the old backup system to the cloud was judged prohibitively complex and expensive.

The university adopted Druva Phoenix, a VMware Cloud on AWS–native SaaS data protection solution, after a rapid POC. Druva centrally protects 160+ VMs, required no on‑prem footprint, and delivered a 50% reduction in data protection costs plus 2x global deduplication (25 TB deduplicated to 10 TB), faster deployments, pay‑as‑you‑use pricing, and the ability to leverage more AWS services.

The University of Manchester

Stuart Catterall

Enterprise Infrastructure Architect