Western Reserve Academy backs up over 3000 cloud accounts and expands surveillance capabilities on campus

Western Reserve Academy's monthly charges to lease their storage and backup solution had grown too high, and they were seeking an economical alternative. Their new storage and backup solution would need to address several challenges.

First, the new storage solution would need to have the capacity and flexibility to back up an ever-increasing store of accounts and records from former students.

Second, following an incident where cloud data was lost, the IT team was looking for a backup solution for both Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. This solution would also need to back up the on-campus file server data and five virtual machines running on Microsoft Hyper-V.

Lastly, WRA required a surveillance solution that could simplify camera and recording management and record higher-quality footage. The previous system consisted of eight separate digital video recorders (DVRs) made by different manufacturers, which required that the security team log into each DVR individually to view footage and manage settings.

Western Reserve Academy installed a 12-bay, 120 TB storage server as the school's primary backup. Using Synology's Active Backup Suite, they set up continuous backups for over 2,400 teacher and student accounts across Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, as well as five virtual machines and an on-campus file server.

A smaller 6-bay NAS was installed as an off-site backup for data from the primary server. Using Snapshot Replication, the system automatically captures regular snapshots of the main server for efficient recovery in case of a disaster.

Finally, WRA configured two 12-bay rackmount servers and an 8-bay desktop unit to replace their existing DVRs. The two rackmount units serve as storage for security footage, while the desktop unit runs Surveillance Station CMS to manage cameras and storage. They have also added several Synology BC500 cameras to their deployment, leveraging the advanced AI features to better protect the students, faculty, and school resources.

WRA has a complete and centralized backup solution up over 1,200 Google Workspace accounts, 1,200 Microsoft 365 accounts, five virtual machines, and 74 TB of file server data. The presence of an offsite backup means that even in the event of a disaster on campus, essential data can still be restored from the secondary backup server.

Since WRA is no longer paying per-account monthly subscription fees, they are able to retain student accounts and records long after graduation without incurring perpetually-rising costs.

Finally, with a centrally-managed surveillance system, WRA was able to increase the number of cameras on campus from 20 to 110 and leverage AI features from the new Synology BC500 cameras. Improved surveillance storage has allowed them to store 24-hour footage in 1080p for up to 60 days - over four times longer than was allowed by the previous solution.