Schools, further education, higher education and university research departments are naturally rich in data.  There is administrative, research and curriculum data being produced and stored on computers on an increasing basis.

A school with one thousand students can have enormous amounts of data produced by the students themselves.  Even if restricted to say a few MB each, that make enormous size of data for a school to deal with.  This is to be added to the less voluminous yet important administrative data concerning staff and school management.

Both further education and higher education establishments have similar issues to schools, with higher volumes and often multiple locations to manage.  And the very nature of a university research department creates knowledge, which is founded in the data stored on computers. 

Confidentiality and security are key demands.  For a school to lose the project work of a pupil would be disruptive.  For a university to lose years of research work would be a tragedy.

In a similar way to a commercial organization, schools and colleges have little time to deal with tape based backup.  There is rarely a dedicated IT person in smaller schools or colleges and, in larger establishments, there are too many projects to be completed to waste time on backup.

A bonus for most education establishments however is the availability broad band access - often with capacities exceeding many commercial organizations.