Cambridge Enterprise has saved tens of thousands of pounds and freed up administrators to do more productive work after switching from traditional tape-based backup to software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud-to-cloud backup from Keepit.
Cambridge Enterprise is a wholly owned subsidiary of the University of Cambridge. It’s a non-profit organisation that helps the university’s research make the transition to the commercial world, and helps manage patents, licensing and relationships with external organisations. It has also overseen the formation of approximately 150 spin-out companies.
The organisation’s data journey begins with a disclosure, when an academic tells them about an invention or some research that could make an impact in public or private sector activity. Such projects are often sensitive – and by definition innovative and unique – and demand a high degree of data protection, including over very long periods, said chief technology officer (CTO) Matt Whiting.
“Often it’s the case that innovations are productised over five to eight years,” said Whiting. “And when there are licensing agreements, these can be for up to 50 years or more.”
As recently as 2019 all data was held on site, on N:drive on the server and backed up to tape. “We had to try to remember to rotate tapes and had to take them off-site,” said Whiting.
In 2019 and 2020, Cambridge Enterprise transitioned to the Microsoft cloud with use of Microsoft 365 and its Dynamics customer relationship suite.
But that strategy was deemed too risky, according to Whiting. “We then had most of our data in Microsoft-land, and it felt like a case of all our eggs in one basket. If you accidentally delete something and don’t notice for 30 days, that file is lost forever, for example,” he said.
“In general, there’s a lack of culpability if services go down, so to keep everything in Microsoft wasn’t going to work and we weren’t going to go back to keeping a copy on-site because of the manual effort involved.”
Then Oxford University Innovation – a similar organisation at the other establishment – passed on its experience of cloud-to-cloud backup with Keepit.
Cambridge Enterprise deployed Keepit to protect its Microsoft 365 and Dynamics customer-focused cloud software, as well as email.
Keepit is one of a number of SaaS cloud-to-cloud backup products and services that have arisen to fill the gap left by cloud providers not offering real backup natively for SaaS apps.
A key feature of Denmark-based Keepit is that it runs its own datacentre capacity, so all backups are independently held away from where source SaaS applications reside.
“A big draw was the potential duration of data retention it made possible,” said Whiting. “In the past, we’d have to hope tapes retained their magnetism and that the LTO drive accepted it. Now our retention period is theoretically indefinite.”
Whiting also praised the ability to control backups from the Keepit web user interface and to search easily through backed up data and restore it with a few clicks.
The resulting costs saved by Cambridge Enterprise are based around the hardware it did not have to buy and the employee time it took to manage in-house backups.
“It would have been £10,000 every five years each time the tape hardware needed replacing,” said Whiting. “Also, we have a senior admin who has saved half their time and can now do other things.”
Keepit has regions based around datacentre capacity in Copenhagen, Frankfurt, London, Zurich, Sydney, Toronto and Washington DC. Each region is treated as a sovereign availability zone with no data moved between them unless approved by the customer. Each region has two active-active datacentres with full-site failover between them. Keepit does not charge for ingress, egress or capacity, but charges by the seat.
Data can be protected on Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics, Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory), Google Workspace, Salesforce.com, Azure DevOps, Power Platform and ZenDesk. “It’s built from the ground up as a cloud backup product,” said Ostergaard.
Keepit backup is designed to run one or two times a day on an incremental forever schema. It is possible to see individual files and preview them, but that depends on the workload.
