The Education Alliance receives confidence through immutability
Education isn’t just a regulated sector — it’s a high-value target. The Education Alliance (TEAL), a Multi-Academy Trust with 12 schools across East Yorkshire, Hull, and York in the UK, manages the digital lives of roughly 8,500 users across Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Those environments hold everything the trust needs to keep running: from day-to-day communications to shared files and critical documentation. When the existing backup contract came up for renewal, the IT team didn’t want a like-for-like replacement. They wanted something they could trust completely, backed by a provider that understood what was at stake.
Education comes with unique cyber risks
Education institutions handle sensitive data, operate across multiple sites, and face a persistent and growing cyberthreat. For Matt Wadsworth, director of IT at The Education Alliance, that threat isn’t abstract — it shapes every data protection decision the team makes.
TEAL’s requirements were driven by long-term retention obligations and the sensitivity of the data it holds. But there was a more specific concern. If the trust’s Microsoft 365 tenant were ever compromised, the consequences would go well beyond data loss: communications would go dark, policies would be inaccessible, and the disaster recovery procedures needed to respond would be unreachable. The backup had to live somewhere the attacker couldn’t follow.
One of our biggest threats from cyber risk is the loss of access to our M365 tenant. Keepit mitigates this threat because it stores our data separate from our production environment.
– Matt Wadsworth
Director of IT, The Education Alliance
Value won the evaluation
When their existing contract came up for renewal, TEAL was already looking for a change. The priority was a clean, easy-to-navigate interface with a straightforward onboarding process. The evaluation focused on what would matter most in a real recovery scenario: ease of use, cost predictability, reliability, and the assurance that backed-up data couldn’t be altered or deleted.
The procurement process stood out, too. The Keepit team took time to understand TEAL’s goals and show how the platform addressed them. Cost matters in education, but value was the real measure, and Keepit delivered on both.
GDPR made data residency non-negotiable
For a UK education institution handling data about children, knowing exactly where that data lives is a legal requirement. Under Article 35 of UK GDPR, organizations in this position must complete a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA), a process that requires knowing precisely where data is stored and which jurisdiction governs it.
Working through the DPIA with the Keepit team helped TEAL establish data residency requirements more quickly than anticipated. Keeping backups within European data centers, independent of the Microsoft and Google tenants but subject to UK and EU data protection law, gave the trust clear, demonstrable control over where its data resides.
Working through the DPIA with the Keepit team meant we could establish data residency requirements far more quickly than we expected.
– Matt Wadsworth
Director of IT, The Education Alliance
Immutability gives the IT team confidence
When you implement a backup procedure, you're already planning for the worst. For Wadsworth, the question is what happens if that worst case extends to the backup itself. A compromised backup doesn't just fail to help; it makes an already bad situation significantly worse.
Keepit stores backed-up data in an independent, vendor-neutral cloud, logically separated from the Microsoft and Google environments it protects. That data can't be altered or deleted by anyone, including a threat actor who has already breached the production environment. For TEAL, that separation is the foundation of the whole data protection strategy.
"To imagine someone breaching your backup too makes the situation ten times worse," says Wadsworth. "Knowing the data is immutable gives you the confidence to know the data is safe."
Faster recovery, less friction
In day-to-day use, Keepit earns its place well outside a crisis. Recovery is faster and simpler than with previous systems. Tasks like recovering a deleted email folder or reviewing data from a specific point in time can now be completed in a few clicks.
Since deployment, recovery time has improved and administrative complexity has reduced. For a lean IT team supporting 12 schools across multiple sites, that reduction in overhead is meaningful.
We primarily chose Keepit as an insurance policy — a get-out-of-jail card should a large-scale disruption occur. But using the solution day to day has allowed us to perform restore procedures far quicker than previous systems and reviewing data from different timestamps at a glance has been a real help.
– Matt Wadsworth
Director of IT, The Education Alliance
Recovery-ready, whatever the threat
With Keepit protecting 82 TB of data across Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Entra ID, The Education Alliance has a recovery foundation it can rely on. Whether the threat is ransomware, accidental deletion, or a full tenant outage, a clean, recoverable copy of the trust's data exists in a separate cloud, under a separate login, and always within the right jurisdiction.