Keeping Milan moving: ATM delivers uninterrupted public transport with data resilience from Veeam

ATM prides itself on keeping the major metropolitan city of Milan and the surrounding area moving through reliable, punctual public transport. By encouraging people to leave their motor vehicles and motorcycles at home, the organization supports lower pollution levels and traffic, contributing to a higher quality of life for the region’s residents.

“At ATM, we’re always innovating and finding new ways to reach sustainability targets,” said Marco Natali, Head of IT Technology & Operations at ATM. “We harness cutting-edge technology and huge volumes of data to make this happen — each day we process millions upon millions of transactions.”

With operations including metro lines, buses, trams, car parks and bicycle sharing services, keeping everything running without a hitch is a key focus for the organization’s IT team. As ATM modernized its digital capabilities by adopting software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, it looked for a comprehensive, future-proof data protection solution to meet its evolving needs.

“Our priority is to provide a consistently high level of service to users,” said Marco Natali. “This is only possible if we’re prepared for both the expected, such as the inevitable data growth and changes in our IT infrastructure, and the unexpected — which could include cyberattack or natural disaster. We set out to increase our organizational resilience dramatically.”

Using Veeam, ATM is enabling the sky-high service continuity that allows the people of Milan and its environs to travel without interruption. The organization first deployed Veeam to protect its on-premises virtualized environments, before extending it to its Microsoft 365 landscape.

“Originally we selected Veeam because it works better with VMware than any other data protection solution,” said Frascolla Adamo Mirko, IT Infrastructure Manager at ATM. “We were impressed by the agentless backup feature, which allowed us to simplify management of backups significantly. When it came time to pick a solution to protect our business-critical Microsoft 365 applications, Veeam was the natural choice. It’s a great advantage to have one toolset to protect data on-premises and in the cloud.”

Today, ATM protects virtual machines hosted on-premises with Veeam. In parallel, Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 keeps 500 mailboxes safe. The organization recently purchased licenses for Veeam Data Platform — Premium to introduce new recovery orchestration capabilities.

“Veeam is helping us build multiple layers of resilience into our IT infrastructure,” said Marco Natali. “For example, our backups are now immutable with Veeam, insulating them from compromise in the event of a cyberattack. With Veeam, we’re driving data availability levels up to nearly 100% and cutting data recovery times from days to minutes. The result is unprecedented service continuity that keeps Milan and the surrounding region moving.”

The Veeam solution has already proved itself, coming to the rescue when a failed security update prevented some customer payments going through. “Veeam allowed us to quickly restore a cluster of application servers and get the payment services back up in just a few minutes rather than the multiple working days it would have taken in the past. That helped us reduce disruption to passengers and avoided a significant financial loss,” said Frascolla Adamo Mirko.

By enabling more efficient management of data protection and ensuring IT services are available 24/7, Veeam is freeing up resources at ATM. The organization is redirecting these resources to innovative new sustainability initiatives, such as rolling out more electric vehicles and upgrading metro lines.

“We have a staggering amount of data that’s growing all the time, and Veeam is helping us to protect and manage this precious asset better than ever before,” said Marco Natali. “As we discover new ways to harness data to improve our services, ensuring non-stop availability only gets more important — putting Veeam at the center of our long-term technology strategy.”

• Enabled near-100% data availability, supporting outstanding passenger experiences
  Veeam helps ATM deliver public transport services that users can rely on 24/7, keeping Milan and the surrounding area moving and contributing to lower pollution and traffic levels.
• Cut data recovery times from days to minutes, avoiding disruption to passengers
  “Veeam allowed us to quickly restore a cluster of application servers and get the payment services back up in just a few minutes rather than the multiple working days it would have taken in the past,” said Frascolla Adamo Mirko. “That helped us reduce disruption to passengers and avoided a significant financial loss.”
• Freed up resources for reinvestment in sustainability initiatives
  From upgrading metro lines to rolling out more electric vehicles, ATM continues to invest in making its operations more sustainable and environmentally friendly.