This post talks about how to ensuring academic continuity through DR in education.
Updated by Dan Zeng on 2024/12/12
Disaster Recovery (DR) is a key measure to protect the integrity of data and systems and achieve rapid business recovery in the face of natural disasters, cyber-attacks or other emergencies. In the education industry, Academic Continuity (AC) refers to guaranteeing the continuity of teaching, research and management activities in the face of unexpected events. As the digital transformation of universities accelerates, the role of disaster recovery in the academic environment is becoming more and more important.
Educational institutions typically involve multiple data types such as academic materials, student records, lab data and financial records. The diversity of these data makes the need for backup and recovery significantly differentiated. For example, research lab data needs to be backed up at a high frequency, while historical archive data may only need to be archived periodically.
Cyberattacks: In recent years, ransomware attacks have significantly increased the threat to educational institutions, leading to system downtime and data encryption.
Natural disasters: Damage to physical facilities such as earthquakes and floods can lead directly to data loss.
Global crises: The importance of disaster preparedness is further amplified by the increased load on information systems during epidemics, such as the surge in demand for distance learning and research.
Many educational institutions have legacy IT infrastructures and budgetary constraints often limit disaster recovery capabilities. At the same time, the lack of a dedicated IT team makes it challenging to develop and implement a disaster recovery strategy.
Data prioritization: Categorize data based on importance and develop a prioritized backup and recovery plan. For example, the data of online teaching platform is placed at the highest priority.
Diversified backup methods: Combine local backup with cloud backup to ensure high data availability and security.
Recovery target setting: Reasonably set recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) to meet the business needs of different data types.
Data backup: Snapshot backup, incremental backup and mirror backup technologies provide flexible options for different scenarios.
Virtualization and cloud services: Virtual machine image backup and cloud-based disaster recovery solutions can significantly reduce recovery time.
Off-site disaster recovery: Ensure data security and reduce the risk of single point of failure by building an off-site data center.
Vinchin Backup & Recovery is a disaster recovery tool designed to address the complex needs of the education industry for a wide range of virtualization platforms (including VMware, Proxmox, Hyper-V, XenServer, XCP-ng, oVirt, and RHV), as well as physical servers (Windows/ Linux systems).
It also supports mainstream database systems (e.g. SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle) and NAS storage devices (e.g. Synology, QNAP), providing advanced features such as agentless backup, instant recovery, and V2V migration to ensure the security and recoverability of critical data without disrupting daily operations.
Its core benefits are reflected in the following areas:
Fast recovery of VMs: Through efficient data processing mechanisms, it is able to quickly restore VMs from backups, minimizing system downtime.
Offsite backup and VM migration: guarantees that acdemic continuity and data security can be maintained through secure data transfer and VM migration even in the event of a major disaster.
Isolated backup storage: Provides an extra layer of security especially for ransomware attacks, protecting backup data from infection and ensuring that production environments can be quickly recovered after an attack.
In addition, Vinchin Backup & Recovery is designed with a user-centric approach with an intuitive user interface and centralized management features that greatly simplify the operation process and save time and labor costs. This, coupled with the provision of 24/7 service support, further enhances user confidence and convenience. As a result, this solution not only enhances disaster recovery capabilities, but also effectively supports the continuation of academic activities.
Founded in 1559, Universidade de Évora is the second oldest university in Portugal. During the COVID-19 outbreak, the university's research team was actively involved in the global fight against the epidemic, particularly in the development of saliva-based diagnostics for the detection of SARS-CoV-2. The smooth running of these studies relied on a stable IT infrastructure and highly available data.
To protect critical research data, the University of Évora utilizes Vinchin Backup & Recovery as a backup solution. Specific results include:
Efficient Backup and Fast Recovery: Ensures continuity of research systems.
Cost-effective: Vinchin provided cost-effective support as part of a pro bono program.
Maximized Data Availability: Strong IT protection for the university's research.
To ensure academic continuity and data security in the education sector, institutions should strengthen their awareness of disaster recovery, upgrade IT facilities and adopt professional tools such as Vinchin Backup & Recovery to optimize backup strategies, implement instant recovery and enhance data security. At the same time, they should build collaborative networks to facilitate resource sharing and improve their disaster preparedness plans through regular assessments and drills to effectively enhance their ability to respond to emergencies.
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