Rancho Cucamonga keeps residents safe and informed about COVID-19

The business challenge

Rancho Cucamonga is one of the largest cities in Southern California, and it’s growing at a steady rate. According to the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), the city’s population grew by more than 38% between 2000 and 2018.

There are a number of reasons for this growth. The city is brimming with sporting events, community festivals, diverse restaurants, historic sites and many housing opportunities. Residents enjoy countless amenities offered to them, along with the knowledge their safety is protected by the city’s nationally recognized public safety departments.

There’s no better time for public safety than during a pandemic. When COVID-19 reached American soil, cities across the country worked fast to ensure resources, mitigation strategies and tools were available to protect their communities. Rancho Cucamonga was one of them, providing extensive public safety information through its website. The site links residents to the nation’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for suggestions about how to protect against illness and what to do if symptoms arise. A link to the California Department of Public Health provides daily updates on the number of cases, tests and deaths, while a link to the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health maintains a COVID-19 Dashboard offering local information about testing, food assistance and business-partnership programs.

“Keeping life-saving information available to residents is a top priority during a pandemic,” said Darryl Polk, Chief Innovation Officer for Rancho Cucamonga. “Downtime isn’t acceptable in today’s world, and certainly not during COVID-19. This is when cities must have complete faith in their data protection strategy — we have complete faith because of Veeam.”

Rancho Cucamonga deployed Veeam Availability Suite in 2017 as the IT team began modernizing the IT infrastructure. Legacy backup (Symantec Backup Exec and IBM Tape Library) had been complicated, requiring the team to monitor backup for 40 hours each month. Recovery had been timeconsuming too, taking hours or days to recover from tape.

“Only one solution fit our roadmap for modernizing the IT infrastructure,” Polk said. “Our team has 100 years of combined IT experience, so we knew exactly what we wanted: fast, easy data protection. Everyone said the same thing: ‘We’re going with Veeam, right?’ It was the easiest decision we’ve ever made.”

The Veeam solution

Not only was replacing legacy backup with Veeam the easiest decision the IT team ever made, it was also the smartest. Veeam modernizes data protection by simplifying backup and increasing recovery speed 99% for the city, saving 40 hours each month and ensuring public safety information is available around the clock. Veeam also protects the city’s public safety video network that monitors areas for crime, the library’s online system offering electronic reading materials (very popular during the pandemic) and the city’s Adopt A Pet portal for fostering or adopting homeless animals (also very popular during the pandemic).

“Cities serve a digital world, so a city’s best defense in a digital world is dependable data protection, and that’s exactly what Veeam provides,” Polk said. “We trust our data is backed up reliably and can be recovered fast. Veeam is the reason we don’t lose sleep anymore.”

Veeam backs up 45 TB across 150 virtual machines on-premises for fast, local recovery and off-premises to iland, a Platinum Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP).

“We love that Veeam makes it so easy to extend data protection to the cloud,” Polk said. “We talked to several of Veeam’s Platinum partners and chose iland because they’re incredibly affordable for the level of service they provide. We know they’ll get the city up and running again in a catastrophe.”

Backing up to iland’s private cloud lets the city do something not possible before — protect data outside of its seismic zone. California is vulnerable to earthquakes, making off-premises data protection critical. The city backs up to a private cloud in a different state — a state that isn’t vulnerable to earthquakes and has a separate power grid.

“Veeam Cloud Data Management was part of our IT modernization strategy from the very beginning,” Polk said. “We knew we wanted cloud backup and Veeam makes it simple. We’re considering Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 next to protect our data in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. We’re also considering a public cloud for costefficient, long-term retention. Veeam’s got us covered.”

The results

• Ensures public safety information, including COVID-19, is always available
  “Deploying Veeam was never a debate,” Polk said. “It didn’t make sense to look at anything else because there’s nothing as reliable as Veeam for data protection and availability.”
• Simplifies backup and increases recovery speed by 99%, saving 40 hours each month
  “Veeam enabled us to recapture 40 hours of productivity every month, allowing us to pivot on our strategic roadmap of modernization projects, including hardware refreshes,” Polk said.
• Provides cloud data management to extend data protection to a hybrid IT infrastructure
  Rancho Cucamonga is considering Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 to eliminate the risk of losing access and control of data Office 365 data. The city is also considering a public cloud for affordable long-term retention. Veeam provides unlimited capacity for long-term retention through native integration with any public cloud.