The University of Leicester uses Macrium Site Manager and Reflect to facilitate a single point of administration for enterprise backup, including the ability to deploy the solution quickly to multiple endpoints.


According to Mark Penny, IT systems specialist at the university, Macrium Reflect backup and imaging technology has protected their IT environment since 2010 -- supporting some 20,000 students and nearly 4,000 staff across 30 different departments and almost 300 course options.


Now, with Macrium Site Manager added to the mix, the IT department has a customisable dashboard for easy display of the most relevant metrics and alerts. A look at Macrium Site Manager in more detail can be found here.


"From my perspective, what really made a step forward was the central management console [Site Manager]. When that was released in 2017, I was particularly keen," Penny says, in the case study.


"In the event that we lost a datacentre and I had no servers left, I would need to get my environment back quickly. Macrium Reflect provides me with that bare-metal restore capability."


Penny can also see at a glance that backups are scheduled and "running nicely". The ease of deploying agents and managing repositories is a big plus too, he says.


Macrium Site Manager makes it easier to spot failing backups, providing administrative tools to quickly identify problems. Backup definitions are easy to create as well as assigning schedules and retention policies or managing backup repositories.


The product includes comprehensive event management, alerts and security logging -- all built on popular Microsoft Windows technologies and requiring no specialist skills to install and configure, according to Macrium.


Another Macrium plus is ransomware protection


Macrium also delivers beyond backup and disaster recovery (DR) by helping protect the university against the increase in ransomware attacks.


"It's worth a license just to protect [backup images] with Macrium Image Guardian (MIG) because if you get a ransomware or encryption malware attack it provides you with a safety net," says Penny.


"It's certainly worth installing Macrium Reflect on your storage server to provide protection of your backup images, as they effectively are your get-out-of-jail-free card."


In 2018, around 850 attacks were reported at some 190 universities and colleges in the UK academic year -- mostly phishing, ransomware or other malware attacks. Reports suggest ransomware attacks in particular are continuing to rise through 2021.


Macrium Reflect and Site Manager provide Leicester University with an extra layer of DR protection in case of hardware or system failure, according to Macrium.


( Photo by samarth shirke on Unsplash )