Ajuntament de Vilafranca del Penedès boosts availability of key public services with Veeam

The Business Challenge

Citizens expect local services to be available when they need them, without fail. By embracing digitalization, municipal bodies are enabling 24/7 access to critical systems, bringing even more convenience into people’s lives. But behind the scenes, these organizations must cope with the resulting growth in data volumes.

“In recent years, we’ve become completely paper-free by digitalizing all our processes,” said Domènec Martinez Garcia, Head of Information Systems and New Technologies at Ajuntament de Vilafranca del Penedès. “We’re introducing innovative new services for citizens all the time. Safeguarding our data is more important than ever before; a task that becomes more complex as our data grows.”

The organization began experiencing issues with its previous data protection solution. Resolving these problems was taking up valuable time and preventing the IT team from focusing on more strategic innovation.

“Our previous tool caused us many difficulties, including a high backup failure rate,” said Domènec Martinez Garcia. “That pulled us away from working on exciting initiatives to spend up to two hours per day on time-consuming manual work. As our team is relatively small compared to the number of internal users and citizens we support, this wasn’t a good use of our time.”

Ajuntament de Vilafranca del Penedès began looking for an alternative data protection solution that could help it to comply with public sector directives. The organization also recognized that now that its systems were fully digitalized, they were more vulnerable to attack, making finding a robust, reliable tool a priority.

“We recently transformed our IT infrastructure with hyperconverged infrastructure from Nutanix,” said Domènec Martinez Garcia. “So, we wanted a leading-edge backup and replication solution that would match our agile new systems. On the technical level, it would have to integrate seamlessly with the AHV hypervisor and our tape robot, and it needed to support our security strategy.”

The Veeam solution

Ajuntament de Vilafranca del Penedès chose Veeam Backup & Replication to step up its data protection capabilities, supporting greater availability of citizen services.

“We compared offerings from leading providers in the market, before narrowing down our choice to Veeam Backup & Replication,” said Domènec Martinez Garcia. “No other solution integrated with our tape robot so effectively, and we were reassured by Veeam’s proven track record.”

Working with systems integrator Sercom, Ajuntament de Vilafranca del Penedès achieved a rapid, low-risk migration to the new technology.

“Sercom is our reference technology partner,” said Domènec Martinez Garcia. “They offer knowledge in both virtualization and backup and contingency planning, which was the ideal combination for this project. They helped us to execute a seamless implementation with no impact on citizen services.”

Using Veeam Backup & Replication, the organization now backs up data for its Nutanix cluster, which runs approximately 45 virtual machines and totals around 5 TB. Each day, the IT team makes incremental copies of the entire infrastructure, with backups stored daily on a dedicated server, before being replicated to network-attached storage and, finally, transferred to tape for long-term storage.

“With the Veeam solution in place, we’re confident that critical systems such as our ERP applications, Oracle databases, municipal website, Linux and Windows servers are all highly protected,” said Domènec Martinez Garcia. “We have streamlined backup and recovery processes, which means that we can restore systems with greater speed and granularity in the event of a disaster. This was put to the test when our services came under external attack, and the Veeam solution proved its worth.”

As an extra layer of protection, Ajuntament de Vilafranca del Penedès is now creating an immutable backup on a server isolated from its production infrastructure.

“We foster a culture of continuous improvement,” said Domènec Martinez Garcia. “The flexibility and scalability of Veeam technology makes it a perfect fit for our IT environment, which continues to change and adapt to meet our citizens’ requirements. The citizens of Vilafranca trust us to respond to their needs, efficiently manage the municipality’s resources and promote improvements to take on future challenges. By protecting our data with Veeam we make sure we can always respond reliably and quickly.”

The Results

• Enhances efficiency through automation, helping to accelerate the pace of innovation:
  Deploying Veeam technology frees up the organization’s IT team to focus on bringing new services to Vilafranca’s citizens sooner.
• Boosts the availability of essential services, elevating citizen satisfaction rates:
  Ajuntament de Vilafranca del Penedès can now restore data 40% faster in the event of an IT infrastructure outage, ensuring it can be there for citizens whenever it is needed.
• Reduces risk of data loss and simplifies regulatory compliance:
  The organization benefits from more resilient backup and replication measures, helping it to fulfill the requirements of GDPR and Spanish public sector directives.