Educational institutions are facing growing pressure to protect critical data, strengthen cyber-resilience and ensure rapid recovery from increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats. Dean Dang, Director of Enterprise Applications and Services, University of Illinois Chicago, tells us how the university modernised its backup and recovery environment with Commvault, reducing recovery times by more than 80%, strengthening ransomware protection and delivering resilient data protection for teaching, research and healthcare services.
University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is one of the USA’s leading public research universities, serving more than 34,000 students across a diverse range of academic and clinical programmes. With a mission grounded in access, excellence and impact, UIC’s Technology Solutions team plays a critical role in supporting teaching, research and healthcare through secure, reliable and innovative IT services.
Faced with ageing backup systems, growing cyberthreats and the need to protect sensitive research and student data, UIC selected Commvault to modernise its backup and recovery environment, delivering greater resilience, scalability and operational confidence.
Legacy systems and rising risks
Before implementing Commvault, UIC’s backup infrastructure relied on ageing ADSM/TSM/Spectrum Protect systems that had accumulated years of technical debt. As the university’s data volumes and security requirements increased, several limitations became apparent.
Key challenges included:
- Risk of data loss – Critical research and administrative systems remained vulnerable to hardware failures, accidental deletion and ransomware attacks.
- Slow recoveries – Large-scale restores could take weeks to complete, far exceeding acceptable recovery objectives.
- Decentralised management – More than 20 edge IT units operated with varying policies, creating compliance, visibility and monitoring challenges.
- Inefficiency and cost – Tape libraries and robotic storage systems increased operational costs while limiting scalability.
- Limited cloud readiness – The lack of integrated offsite and cloud backup capabilities left the university exposed to additional risk.
As Director of Enterprise Applications and Services, Dang recognised that UIC required a modern, centralised backup platform capable of delivering speed, scalability and resilience across an increasingly hybrid IT environment.
The solution: Commvault as a managed service provider model
Following a comprehensive evaluation of cost, compatibility and functionality, UIC selected Commvault as its enterprise backup and recovery platform.
A key differentiator was Commvault’s ability to support a shared-services approach. UIC’s central IT organisation could operate the platform in a model similar to a managed service provider (MSP), allowing departmental IT teams to retain operational flexibility while benefiting from enterprise-wide governance and protection.
Dean Dang, Director of Enterprise Applications and Services, University of Illinois Chicago, said: “Commvault let us balance local control with centralised oversight. Departments can schedule their own backups and restores while still benefitting from strong policies, encryption and support.”
Key capabilities implemented included:
- Nightly automated backups with incremental and synthetic full backups.
- Global deduplication, reducing storage requirements by more than 95%.
- Air Gap Protect and immutable backups to strengthen ransomware protection.
- Cleanroom recovery capabilities for secure, isolated testing and validation.
- Cloud-native protection for Azure, AWS, Microsoft 365, SaaS applications and other modern workloads.
The results: Faster, stronger and smarter resilience
The transition to Commvault significantly strengthened UIC’s backup, recovery and cyber-resilience capabilities.
Key outcomes included:
- Recovery times reduced by more than 80% – Potential downtime was reduced from more than 48 hours to fewer than eight hours, significantly lowering projected business impact.
- Scalable protection – The university can now protect servers, research datasets, containers, SaaS applications and cloud workloads through a unified platform.
- Enhanced cyber-resilience – Immutable storage, anomaly detection and validated restore points provide greater confidence in recovery following a cyberincident.
- Optimised storage costs – Data is intelligently tiered across on-premises, cloud and archive environments, balancing performance with cost efficiency.
- Leadership support – Clear financial modelling around downtime avoidance and reduced loss projections helped secure executive backing for continued resilience investments.
Looking ahead
As UIC continues to expand its hybrid infrastructure and support new educational, research and healthcare initiatives, Commvault remains a core component of its resilience strategy.
With increased automation, cloud recovery capabilities and validated restore points, the university is moving closer to its objective of reducing recovery times from days to hours in the event of a cyberattack or major disruption.
“Commvault gives us the resilience to protect our mission – education, research and healthcare – while preparing for whatever comes next,” added Dang.
