City of Phoenix recovers data in minutes with Veeam for 24/7 public services

As a growing city that currently ranks as the fifth largest in the US, Phoenix, Arizona boasts an impressive quality of life for citizens and visitors alike. Still, the City of Phoenix is always looking for ways to achieve more within the constraints of public funding.

“Our vision is to make Phoenix a great place to live, work and visit by fostering a dynamic and sustainable environment with exceptional public services,” said Jerry Simpson, Deputy CIO, Infrastructure Services at the City of Phoenix. “From introducing new self-service options on our website to beefing up our disaster recovery measures, we’re evolving constantly to enhance our offering.”

The City of Phoenix’s 16,000 users rely on 24/7 availability of data to work effectively. To speed up data recovery and boost efficiency, the organization decided to move away from tape-based backups. It looked for something easier to manage and that could better leverage its investments in Pure Storage and VMware technology. 

With Veeam protecting its data, the City of Phoenix is unlocking greater continuity of service and efficiency. The organization is also now in a better position to deliver high-quality citizen services around the clock.

“We ran a six-month evaluation process of different data protection solutions on the market and Veeam came out on top,” said Simpson. “It hit the mark on integration with Pure Storage and VMware. We were also really impressed by Veeam support; Veeam is one of the few vendors that seems to really understand working with government. They adjusted to our timelines and didn’t pressure us, and brought together technology, people and process for a total solution. Finally, Veeam couldn’t be beaten on cost.”

The City of Phoenix now backs up just under a Petabyte of data with Veeam. The data includes production workloads for the full range of resident's services offered by the organization, for everything from customer billing systems to human resources applications, waste management to public transit systems.

“We create immutable snapshots of our data using Pure Storage snapshot capabilities and then back up from these snapshots using Veeam,” said Simpson. “Pure Storage and Veeam work together seamlessly to give us multiple layers of protection against compromise of our data. It’s a given that Veeam integrates seamlessly with VMware which allows us to capitalize fully on our investments in that technology too — something that was a particular advantage following the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, which increased our costs significantly.”

The organization also chose to protect its business-critical Microsoft 365 environment with Veeam, since the City’s employees rely heavily on applications like Exchange Online, SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive to collaborate. 

“As our users get more comfortable sharing and storing information in the cloud, Microsoft 365 will only become more important to our operations,” said Simpson. “The 30-day retention policy Microsoft offers simply wasn’t cutting it anymore, so we decided to go with Veeam. It was straightforward to implement Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 and to use it to recover data, so the project has been a great success.”

By deploying Veeam, the City of Phoenix slashed data recovery times and data protection costs, helping it achieve a fast return on investment. 

“Dial-a-Ride is our shared-ride service that acts as a lifeline for residents with disabilities in Phoenix who struggle to use public transit,” said Simpson. “The server handling payments failed, but we were able to get it back online with Veeam in 15 minutes rather than the hours it would’ve taken previously. When you consider that we’ve also reduced our data protection costs by at least 30%, the move to Veeam really has paid off for the City of Phoenix.” 

Moreover, data backup and restore tasks are now no longer limited to a select few highly trained members of staff. As a result, the City of Phoenix IT team can operate more efficiently.

“We used to have one employee responsible for troubleshooting backups and recovering data,” said Simpson. “Veeam is so easy to use that we’ve been able to distribute those tasks among a team of nine people, eliminating a bottleneck and allowing us to respond faster. With Veeam on our side, we can minimize interruptions to citizen services and increase our efficiency — an excellent result on both counts.”

• Enables data recovery in minutes rather than hours to help maintain high quality of citizen services 24/7
  “Veeam had our Dial-a-Ride service for residents with disabilities back online in 15 minutes rather than the hours it would’ve taken otherwise,” said Simpson. “That translates into real-life impact for the residents we serve.”
• Cuts data protection costs by at least 30% to free up investments for other technology initiatives
  The City of Phoenix is now working on orchestrating its DR processes using Veeam, which will help increase business continuity even further.
• Simplifies management of data backups and recovery management to eliminate the need for specialized skills
  Instead of a single employee being responsible for troubleshooting backups and recovering data, tasks are distributed among a team of nine, driving down response times.