"Together. Caring. Pioneering." This is the demand that the LMU Klinikum in Munich places on its activities every day. By closely integrating patient care, research and teaching, the hospital provides the best possible services for its patients and at the same time paves the way for tomorrow's medical care.
With a total of 28 specialist clinics, 13 institutes, 7 departments and 52 interdisciplinary centers, LMU Klinikum is one of the largest and most modern medical facilities in Europe.
Medicine and care are changing as a result of new technologies, which can be experienced every day at LMU Klinikum. The digitalization of clinical workflows is well advanced; mobile devices enable paperless documentation and electronic patient files facilitate the exchange of information in the treatment process. LMU Klinikum is also involved in innovative developments at an early stage. In pilot projects, for example, the clinic is examining how artificial intelligence can support the diagnosis and recognition of diseases.
"In order to take advantage of these many new opportunities, our organization relies on high-performance and high-availability IT," said Simon Leutner, Head of Central Services in the Medical Technology and IT department.
To this end, LMU Klinikum operates an extensive software landscape at the data center in Großhadern, which runs on 1,200 mostly virtualized servers.
"The well-being and health of our patients ultimately depends on the availability of our IT," said system administrator Harald Graf. "If critical applications — such as the administration system in the emergency room or the RIS software in radiology — were unavailable, it would not only disrupt our well-established processes, but information necessary for successful treatment might be missing as well."
The IT department must protect its systems not only from technical malfunctions, but from targeted cyberattacks. Healthcare facilities have increasingly been frequent targets of ransomware attacks in recent years — the number of incidents almost doubled in 2021 alone.
"Data backup solutions are therefore a critical component in protecting us from these and other risks," said Simon Leutner. "We need the certainty that we can restore all important systems very quickly in the event of an emergency, thus avoiding interruptions to hospital operations."
However, the previous backup solution could no longer meet the clinic’s increasing requirements.
"The software required an enormous amount of manual administration and was anything but easy to use," Graf reported. "As a result, we were repeatedly dependent on the support of external service providers on a day-to-day basis. Support problems from the manufacturer also created difficult situations on occasion."
After extensive market research, the IT team at LMU Klinikum decided to use Veeam Availability Suite as the backup solution for their VMware vSphere environment and as part of their physical-server infrastructure. All virtual machines and around 30 physical systems are now backed up with Veeam — a total data volume of around 400TB.
During each backup process, two backups are created and stored on separate storage systems from NetApp and Hitachi. In addition, the IT team has implemented a tape infrastructure to back up all data offline. This protects the data from manipulation, such as encryption by crypto Trojans.
"Veeam offers us a variety of powerful technologies to help us get a handle on the increased demands of data protection," Graf said. "In particular, I would highlight SureBackup technology. It allows us to run automated recovery tests without impacting the performance of our production environment."
SureBackup uses a virtual lab environment to check whether the backed-up virtual machines can be restored after a failure and performs a series of standardized tests for this purpose. The results can then be exported to PDF reports.
"With the previous backup solution, performing these recovery tests was extremely time consuming, which meant that we could only check the executability of the backed-up systems on occasion,” said Leutner. “Today, we test all servers multiple times a year and always have up-to-date and complete documentation for internal or external audits.”
A second decisive point in the decision for Veeam was the solution’s intuitive operation. While the previous backup software could only be used by specialists with the appropriate training, the IT team did not need a long training period for the new solution.
"We once had a situation where a colleague on call had to restore a virtual machine outside of normal working hours,” said Graf. “Although he had never worked with Veeam before, the restore went smoothly — that says everything about how easy Veeam is to use.”
Granular restores of individual application objects are also possible with Veeam. The clinic’s IT department has various Veeam Explorers available for this purpose — including for Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory and SQL Server. In practice, these tools have already proven themselves several times.
"We recently had to reset an SQL database for our token system," said Leutner, citing one example. "After changing an administrator password, remote access to our IT environment was no longer possible across the board. With Veeam Explorer, we were able to use point-in-time recovery to restore the SQL database to its status before the change — and after just 10 minutes, everything was back to normal."
In addition to Veeam's backup and recovery functions, LMU Klinikum now also uses the Veeam ONE monitoring solution, which is a component of the Veeam Availability Suite.
"We were looking for a solution that was as simple as possible, specifically to permanently monitor the utilization and availability of our virtual servers,” said Graf. “Veeam ONE appealed to us much more than the monitoring solution from our virtualization provider."
For example, the IT team can easily set up an alert for any service with a single click and is automatically notified when the CPU load reaches a certain threshold.
"We can recognize very quickly when the performance of critical applications, such as the hospital information system, deteriorates and immediately take corresponding measures," said Leutner. "That way, we ensure that our doctors and nurses do not suffer from slow applications during their work. Moreover, conspicuous CPU values or data streams can always be an indication of suspicious activity in the network. Veeam ONE helps us detect threats such as ransomware at an early stage and render them harmless."
Secure hospital operation through maximum IT availability
The IT department at LMU Klinikum uses Veeam Availability Suite to back up around 1,200 virtual and physical workloads and keep a continuous eye on the availability and utilization of all key services. If servers go down, they can now be restored within minutes. "This way we ensure that doctors and nursing staff can access all of the patient data they need at any time," said Simon Leutner.
Cost savings by eliminating need for external service providers
"Our previous backup solution could only be used with external support," said Harald Graf. "With Veeam, we now have all data backup and recovery processes under our own control. Because the solution is so easy to use, we no longer have to rely on external service providers."
Verifiable adherence to compliance requirements
Veeam's SureBackup technology automatically checks the recoverability of all backed-up systems and generates PDF reports with the results. The IT team can use these documents for internal and external audits, proving that all critical systems would be quickly restored in the event of a failure.
With its two Munich campuses — Großhadern and Innenstadt — LMU Klinikum is one of the largest university hospitals in Europe. Every year, around 500,000 patients place their trust in the skill, care and commitment of LMU’s 11,000 employees. In addition to the outpatient care facilities, around 2,000 beds are available for partial and full inpatient treatment.
As a pioneer in the digitalization of healthcare, LMU Klinikum needed a comprehensive strategy for securing data and applications. The IT department was therefore looking for a solution that would enable simple and fast recovery of virtual and physical resources, and comprehensively protect the IT infrastructure against potential risks.