University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is home to more than 34,000 students and 13,000 faculty and staff. Technology Solutions, UIC’s central IT organization, is responsible for ensuring the resilience of research, clinical, and administrative systems.
We spoke with Dean Dang, Director of Enterprise Applications and Services, about UIC’s data protection journey and how Commvault helps the university safeguard mission-critical operations.
Q: Can you start by introducing yourself and giving us a sense of UIC’s mission and what drives your IT strategy?
Dean: My name is Dean Dang, and I serve as the Director of Enterprise Applications and Services within Technology Solutions. We support the university’s administrative and academic functions, aligning IT with UIC’s mission: to provide the broadest access to the highest levels of educational, research, and clinical excellence. Our commitment to access, vitality, empowerment, and creativity is our strength.
Q: Before onboarding Commvault, what were the biggest data protection and resilience challenges UIC was up against?
Dean: Our legacy backup system, Spectrum Protect, had accumulated years of technical debt. Recovery was painfully slow — restoring large file servers could take weeks. We also dealt with decentralized IT management across 20+ departments, inconsistent backup policies, inefficient tape storage, and no cloud options. The risks of data loss and downtime were too high for a university of our size.
Q: When it came time to modernize, what stood out about Commvault that made it the right fit for UIC?
Dean: We’d known Commvault for over a decade and trusted it for Active Directory and Exchange backups. When we evaluated options, Commvault stood out. The ability to take VM snapshots without server agents was huge. Even more important was the multi-tenant model. It let us provide departmental autonomy while maintaining centralized governance and support — exactly what higher ed needs.
Q: What changes have you seen since implementing Commvault, and how has it elevated UIC’s cyber resilience?
Dean: With Commvault, we do nightly backups with deduplication and synthetic fulls. That reduces storage demand and speeds up restores. Departments get their own “tenants” to manage backups, but we still enforce policies and provide support. All backups are encrypted and can be stored on-prem or in the cloud.
We also use Air Gap Protect for immutable copies and Cleanroom Recovery for safe recovery testing. This setup means we can recover mission-critical systems in under 8 hours — compared to days or weeks before.
Q: If you were talking to other higher-ed IT leaders, what top lessons or best practices would you share about building cyber resilience?
Dean:
- Enforce multifactor authentication everywhere, especially admin accounts. Everyone can be phished.
- Build a pragmatic, team-driven DR plan. Don’t try to solve everything at once — build consensus and clarity.
- Test nightly backups. Make them immutable, air-gapped, and validated so you know you can restore when it matters.
Q: How do you communicate cyber risks to non-technical leaders?
Dean: We translate risk into business terms. How many hours of downtime? What does that cost in productivity, reputation, and compliance? We use “what if” scenarios, dashboards, and regular updates on metrics like backup health and restore times. When leaders see the financial and mission impact, the case for resilience is clear.
Q: Looking ahead, how does Commvault fit into UIC’s long-term strategy?
Dean: UIC is hybrid — on-campus, cloud, and SaaS. Commvault covers all of it, from VMs and databases to M365 and even emerging AI workloads. With 95%+ deduplication and tiered storage, we keep costs under control. And with anomaly detection, automation, and cleanroom testing, we’re preparing for a future where downtime is measured in hours, not days.
Read more about the University of Illinois of Chicago’s data protection journey here.
