Getting Back to Basics: How Berry College Built a Data Foundation to Grow On

Berry College has the largest college campus in the world, covering almost 27,000 acres in northwest Georgia. Home to degrees in everything from animal science to creative technology, it's run by a small but mighty IT team.

That team faced a mounting data problem on three fronts. Marketing archives sat on an aging physical server that was running out of room. A growing network of security cameras, with more added every time a new building or parking lot came online, kept straining local storage. And OneDrive and Teams files that had replaced Berry's old shared drives weren't being backed up effectively. The data kept growing, but the team responsible for its management didn’t.

To tackle this challenge, the team started with backup and disaster recovery and built from there, turning a gap in redundancy into a resilient foundation for backup, surveillance, and decades of archives. Here’s what that looked like in practice. (EDUCAUSE 2026 attendees can get a firsthand look at this solution during Wasabi's poster session in Denver, September 30th at 9:30am MT.)

First, the backup issue

Jason Murphine, Berry's Director of Information Technology, didn't necessarily plan to overhaul the college's entire storage system. He was trying to solve two smaller, persistent problems he faced every day. First, on the server side, the team was backing up Berry’s data to local HPE ShareEasy servers stored in a different building on campus. It gave them some resiliency and some redundancy, but not much of either, according to Murphine.

The second issue that kept nagging at Murphine was the data coming from Office 365. Outside of email, OneDrive and Teams files weren’t being backed up the way they should. But where to store it all? Buying storage in the amounts Berry needed was too expensive, but cloud solutions also ranged widely in price.

Murphine and his team first looked at Azure. They had already used it for SQL jobs, so it was an obvious next step. But then, at a conference, the Veeam team that had worked with Berry for years pointed Murphine toward Wasabi instead. He walked over to the Wasabi booth, listened for a few minutes, and was sold.

“The seamless integration with Veeam made the transition to Wasabi effortless,” said Murphine. “We can now manage our backups efficiently without the constant worry of running out of space.” Maybe most importantly, Berry ended up paying roughly half of what other cloud storage would have cost for meaningfully more storage.

Today, everything is backed up through Veeam and replicated across two separate geographic locations, protecting the college's data against regional disasters. Each of those replicated backups is also set to immutable storage. In practice, that means once a backup is written, it can't be altered, deleted, or encrypted until its retention period expires. That's vital for compliance and cybersecurity: it keeps data safe from ransomware and guarantees Berry always has a clean copy to restore from. Immutability has also become part of the conversation with cybersecurity insurance, since insurers increasingly want to see immutable, replicated backups as part of a company's cyber resilience strategy.

Building on top of a strong foundation

Once backup and disaster recovery were in a good place, Berry College was ready to start building on top of that foundation.

Security camera footage was the next candidate for better storage solutions. Berry's cameras were generating 4–5 terabytes of footage a day. New buildings and expansion projects for parking lots and other campus areas meant more cameras and more data on the horizon. Paired with a 35-day retention period, all of that data was straining the college’s physical servers.

Moving that footage to Wasabi Surveillance Cloud let Berry keep data on site for 20 days and push the rest to the cloud, without changing the retention policy at all. On top of that, Wasabi’s lack of egress fees means that the team can use the environment however they need to, without worrying about constraints from downloading footage they need. “I appreciate the simplicity of Wasabi’s pricing model,” said Murphine. “Unlike other providers, there are no hidden fees or complicated tiers—just straightforward cloud storage at a great value.”

Murphine estimated that scaling storage the old way, by purchasing new servers and adding infrastructure for new cameras, would have run roughly 10 times what it costs through Wasabi.

After surveillance footage came the marketing department's archive. Much like the security department, marketing had their own physical server that was filling up fast. Their pictures and videos couldn’t be deduplicated, and they planned to keep the 20 years of archival information in perpetuity. Berry moved that content to Wasabi Cloud NAS, and Murphine set it up himself in an afternoon. “Our partnership with Wasabi has transformed how we handle data management,” he said. “We’ve freed up our IT team to focus on more strategic initiatives rather than just managing backups.”

There’s one thread that runs through these use cases: simplicity. The IT team didn't solve three separate data problems with three separate tools. They solved them with the same storage environment, run by the same small team handling a data footprint that kept growing. Berry didn't need more headcount or a more complicated environment to keep up. They needed one foundation solid enough to build on, and the flexibility to keep adding to it as new needs came up.

See it all firsthand at EDUCAUSE

At EDUCAUSE 2026, Berry College and Wasabi are presenting a poster session about resilient data foundations in a higher-ed context. Colleges and universities face unique challenges, including fragmented systems and fast-growing data footprints that are hard to protect and expensive to manage. Dive into more details about Berry’s storage transformation and get your questions answered at our session in Denver.

You can also read the full case study, including the complete numbers behind Berry's 50% cost reduction.