Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust manages over 500 TB of data, which includes sensitive patient information. Its 8,000 users need 24/7 access to maintain high-quality healthcare at Bedford Hospital and Luton and Dunstable University Hospital.
“In the IT team, it’s our job to prepare for the unexpected, which could happen at any time,” said Todi Skordileva, Infrastructure Manager at Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. “Any disruption to our IT services could prevent patients from accessing potentially life-saving care, leading to them having to reschedule appointments or come back for repeat procedures.”
To protect against a range of scenarios, including the growing possibility of a cyberattack, Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust looked to bolster its data protection capabilities. The organization also recognized an opportunity to operate more efficiently.
“Before Veeam, we were wasting an hour a day checking backups,” said Dean Khwaja, Head of ITC Technical Services at Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. “Not confident about our legacy tools, we used Excel spreadsheets to track that they’d completed successfully. Our previous approach simply wasn’t tenable.”
When the organization recently merged two large hospitals under a single NHS Foundation Trust, the IT team faced fresh challenges. To enable greater efficiency, Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust adopted a policy of standardization where possible.
“The hospitals had different tools and processes,” said Skordileva. “We wanted to merge them and apply best practices across the board. And with clinicians now moving between sites, we needed common IT systems to make this seamless.”
To maintain data integrity and ensure clinicians could provide the best possible care, Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust chose Veeam. The organization looked to long-term partner Oxford Network Consultants to guide it through the selection and deployment process for a new solution.
“What we were looking for in a data protection solution was something that’s solid and just works — and that’s what Veeam delivers,” said Khwaja. “The simplicity of managing it and speed of recovering data are the two other factors that made it a compelling option for us. Oxford Network Consultants had worked with us on our technology roadmap since 2017, so we trusted their recommendation.”
Using Veeam and with help from Oxford Network Consultants, Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust adopted a 3-2-1 backup approach (maintaining three copies of data stored on two different media, with one copy stored off site). The organization takes advantage of the new features rolled out by Veeam to continue increasing its cyber-resilience.
“When we originally installed Veeam, we had combined repositories to store backups,” said Khwaja. “Recognizing the vulnerability of that, we isolated our repositories and introduced immutable backups with Veeam. We have also encrypted them to provide an additional layer of protection.”
Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust recently decided to extend its usage of Veeam to its business-critical Microsoft 365 environment. With help from Oxford Network Consultants, the organization migrated 7,500 Microsoft 365 mailboxes, which it originally stored in Microsoft Azure blob storage and now stores on-premises.
“Choosing Veeam to back up our Microsoft 365 environment means we don’t have to rely on the built-in 30-day retention policy,” said Skordileva. “As people leave, we can delete old accounts from our active directory, confident we have a reliable backup through Veeam. It’s a simple two-click process with a report highlighting any issues.”
“We moved our Microsoft 365 backups from Azure to on-premises storage due to cost and to maximize use of our existing investments,” added Khwaja. “Veeam seamlessly supports backups to and from the cloud or on-premises environments, giving us great flexibility.”
Veeam is supporting Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust through the merger process, helping it to cope with change. The organization is making the most of integrated management tools to ease the pressure on its IT team.
“On several occasions we’ve needed to move backups between storage locations, but migrating a huge amount of data can take time,” said Skordileva. “Using Veeam to split the backups, we’ve moved things around much faster and more easily. With Veeam, we can recover data for users in minutes and we’re saving at least an hour per day on checking backups — a win-win outcome for the IT team and the Trust’s users. Ultimately, that helps us deliver on our mission of ensuring continuity of care for patients.”