City of Victoria builds business resiliency and increases ransomware protection with Veeam

The business challenges

Victoria is a modern, forward-thinking city. It has a dynamic economy, a vibrant arts and culture scene and spectacular outdoor settings adorned with ocean views and mountain vistas. Victoria is a place where sustainability and wellbeing lead to a prosperous future.

One of the city’s highest priorities is providing residents with reliable services. From water distribution, garbage collection and emergency assistance to recreational classes, transportation planning and land-use development, city services are the foundation of a strong and successful community.

Numerous IT systems support city services including SCADA for water distribution, FDM for fire department records management, Esri for geographic mapping, Tempest for property taxation and utility billing, JD Edwards for financial management and EBMS for event planning. All systems run on a Microsoft Azure Stack hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).

We recently chose Azure Stack HCI for agility and efficiency,” said Mike Palmer, CIO for the City of Victoria. “We love the simplicity it offers, so as our legacy backup solutions were approaching end of life, we looked for a new solution that would dovetail with that simplicity.”

Palmer said backing up Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware virtual machines (VMs) with the legacy backup solutions hadn’t been easy because they were overly complicated

“Our goal is 100% confidence that data is always protected and city services are always available, so we deployed Veeam Backup & Replication,” he said. “At the time, ransomware was just beginning to surface as a threat, and Veeam had the added benefit of helping increase our ransomware protection. Later, as we began transitioning to Microsoft Office 365, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 helped us protect the city’s historical data. Veeam’s capabilities give us the confidence we need.”

The Veeam solution

Veeam helps Victoria build business resiliency by simplifying backup and disaster recovery, and it increases the city’s security posture by boosting ransomware protection. Veeam also provides total access, control and protection of city data in Microsoft Office 365.

“Business resiliency and cybersecurity are two of the city’s biggest priorities, so having a reliable solution like Veeam means there’s no second guessing if data is protected and city services are available,” Palmer said.

Veeam backs up 25 TB across 130 Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere VMs in Azure Stack HCI on-premises and sends backup copies to tape, so data is air gapped in case of a ransomware attack. In the future, backup copies will go to Azure for immutability. Veeam also scans VM data for malware.

“If an employee downloads an infected file without knowing it, Veeam flags it in a backup,” Palmer said. “That level of industry-leading proactive prevention is exactly what we’re aiming for.”

Maintaining complete access and control of data in Microsoft Office 365 is now easier than ever with Veeam. Veeam helps the city make sure data is always protected and accessible.

“Having the ability to go further back than 90 days for SharePoint and 30 days for Exchange items is critical because of legal and regulatory requirements,” Palmer said. “Veeam gives us this level of protection all in one.”

Veeam helps cities like Victoria meet compliance requirements with efficient search and recover features. Palmer said it’s a matter of a few clicks and data is restored.

“Again, it’s all about simplicity, protection and retention, and that’s what Veeam delivers,” he continued. “There’s a lot of overcomplexity in the IT industry, but not with Veeam. It’s so easy to use that we save at least 10 hours in troubleshooting time each week, giving us more time to work on projects that bring value to the city.”

The results

• Simplifies backup and disaster recovery to strengthen business resiliency
  “Veeam is dependable and works every time,” Palmer said. “It helped us simplify data protection of our heterogenous hypervisor environment.”
• Increases the city’s security posture by improving ransomware protectionVeeam helps organizations prevent, detect and restore from a ransomware attack.
• Provides total access, control and protection of city data in Microsoft Office 365
  In addition to protecting historical data during the city’s transition to Microsoft Office 365, Veeam protects all data against accidental deletion, security threats and retention-policy gaps. Data can be stored on-premises and in the cloud for fast, easy access.