Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust provides uninterrupted life changing services with data protection by Veeam

For vulnerable people struggling with their mental health, learning disabilities and other clinical issues, services from Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust can be life-changing. The organization’s IT team supports nearly 5,000 staff and a range of general practitioners in the region, so that they can treat approximately 5,000 people each day. It also acts as a service provider to more than 140 sites with over 6,500 users.

“Our job is to keep essential data, such as patient histories, clinical databases and scheduling systems, at users’ fingertips at all times,” said Stuart Harwood, Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust. “Without ready access to this data, it’s that much more difficult for our users to deliver a high quality of care.”

When the Trust’s IT team saw that its Backup Exec data protection solution was failing to keep up with demand, they decided to take immediate action. With data volumes growing exponentially, the organization knew that the backup challenges would only get worse.

“We’d reached the limits of what we could do with Backup Exec,” said Harwood. “When we replaced the storage for our VMware environment, it was the perfect time to find an alternative. We wanted a toolset that was simple to use, cost-efficient, and future-proof, so that we could take Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust into the next phase of its evolution.”

With Veeam, Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust transformed its data protection capabilities, helping it to provide exceptional patient care round-the-clock. The Trust selected Veeam over several other vendors.

“Veeam was the ideal data protection solution for us because it was far more competitively priced and straightforward to use than the other tools available,” said Harwood. “Veeam allows us to just point and click at workloads to set up backups, which was a dramatic and much-appreciated change.”

Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust now backs up its most critical databases every night using Veeam. The organization quickly embraced the 3-2-1-0 backup rule, ensuring it keeps three copies of data stored on two different types of media with one stored offsite. The IT team runs frequent data restore tests to ensure there are zero errors in its recovery plan. Soon, the Trust will extend its backup rule to 3-2-1-1-0 by introducing immutable backups, giving it an extra layer of defense against cyber-attack.

“We’re doing some reconfiguration so that we can roll out immutable backups in the very near future,” said Harwood. “This will be the cherry on top of our cyber-resilient infrastructure.”

Thanks to Veeam, Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust has reduced its recovery time objective (RTO) to four hours for its most important data, eight hours for medium-priority workloads and best endeavors for the least critical parts of its environment.

“Veeam gives us precise control over data protection, so we can set our backup and restore policies to balance performance and efficiency,” said Harwood. “We can now recover VMs in a couple of minutes rather than a couple of hours, which makes a huge difference to how quickly we can resume operations when our services are interrupted. We’ve also increased our backup success rate to nearly 100%, in stark contrast to how things were pre-Veeam.”

Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust is considering the next stage of its cloud computing journey. Built-in cloud integration features with Veeam will ensure that the organization is covered every step of the way.

“Soon, we expect to add Wasabi cloud storage to our IT environment,” said Harwood. “The ability to back up data to and from the cloud easily and efficiently with Veeam is a big advantage to us. As soon as we’ve got immutable backups up and running, we’re excited to explore more native functionality from Veeam to see how we can derive even more value for our users and the patients we serve.”

• Enables recovery of virtual machines (VMs) 98% faster, helping to avoid interruptions to patient care.
  By ensuring critical data and IT systems are available for users with Veeam, the Trust enables high service continuity.
• Increases backup success rate to almost 100% and provides instant visibility of any failed backups, driving the risk of data loss to virtually zero.
  “Historically, it was luck of the draw whether backups failed, and we lacked the insight to find out what had gone wrong,” said Harwood. “The difference with Veeam is like night and day. For the first time, we have the peace of mind that comes with truly comprehensive data protection, and that’s because of Veeam.”
• Saves the IT team time while boosting cyber-resilience with automated data protection capabilities.
  The Trust spends less time administering backups and restoring data while simultaneously enhancing its protection against cyber-attack.