Catholic Education in Western Australia (CEWA) is the second-largest non-government education provider in the state, educating almost 17% of all school-aged children across 162 schools and colleges. For years CEWA has pioneered digital solutions to support a student-centered approach to education. From iPads in classrooms to personalized AI-enhanced learning, the organization seeks innovative ways to incorporate technology into teaching.
Lee Swift, CISO, CEWA, said, “We see cloud-based services as a powerful way to offer students the benefits of the latest technology without sending our costs soaring. As part of that strategy, we’ve migrated most of the on-premises file shares and mail servers at our schools to Microsoft 365.”
Including students, teachers and staff, CEWA now has more than 90,000 Microsoft 365 users and over 1 PB of data on the platform. Data volumes continue to grow and some must be retained for more than 99 years for compliance. As its Microsoft 365 data expanded, CEWA recognised that native backup capabilities could no longer deliver on retention and recovery requirements.
“We’ve seen education providers in Australia suffer cyberattacks that take months to recover from,” said Swift. “To mitigate our risk and maintain a strong compliance posture, we wanted to deliver enhanced protection for our Microsoft 365 accounts.”
CEWA had already relied on Veeam Data Platform to protect over 60 VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V environments across more than 300 on-premises servers. Based on that experience, it selected Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365.
“From the very start of the relationship, Veeam has always gone out of their way to understand our strategic direction and give us what we need to achieve our goals,” said Mike Kovacevic, CIO, CEWA. “When we started the search for a data protection solution for Microsoft 365, Veeam knew exactly what we were looking for. And when we compared the features, market maturity and expert reviews of Veeam with solutions from other vendors, the best choice was clear.”
Working closely with Microsoft, Veeam helped CEWA configure the solution and begin backing up Microsoft 365 accounts in less than an hour. “The setup process was incredible — I didn’t realize just how quick it would be,” said Swift. “With over 90,000 Microsoft 365 accounts to back up, we were anticipating a months-long project. In fact, setup took just 40 minutes. We were blown away by how easy it was.”
Kovacevic added: “Our Veeam deployment was so fast and smooth that we were able to bring forward other digital initiatives. This included centralising privacy and security impact assessments for new AI and edtech tools — eliminating the need for each individual school to duplicate this work.”
With Veeam, CEWA can now retain Microsoft 365 data indefinitely and recover it on demand, meeting the highest standards for data protection in Australia including the Essential Eight cybersecurity framework. Looking ahead, CEWA plans to empower school IT managers to recover student data themselves, with access controls and audit trails ensuring compliance.
Swift said: “To further strengthen our data resilience, we’re now looking to adopt a multi-cloud strategy — storing a copy of our Microsoft 365 data with a second cloud provider. We’re looking forward to working with Veeam to make our multi-cloud vision a reality.”
The Results
- 40 minutes to deploy and configure: “With Veeam, we set up automated backup jobs for over 1 PB of Microsoft 365 data in under an hour,” said Swift. “There was zero impact for our users.”
- 50% faster recovery: “Using the Veeam solution, we can now recover files for our users in minutes.”
- 99+ years retention: With immutable unlimited cloud storage from Veeam, CEWA ensures its growing Microsoft 365 data is always protected, secure and accessible.
