Expanding with confidence: BMC flourishes with 80% faster data resilience from Veeam

Driven by a pioneering spirit, BMC is reaching new heights in the quality of its teaching, clinical practice, research, and pastoral care. The organization is gearing up to become the first Saudi education institution to operate internationally, while extending hybrid learning opportunities for students.

“BMC is growing in size and advancing our offering,” said Nabil Alsanbi, IT Operations Director at Batterjee Medical College. “At the end of this year, we’ll open a new branch in Dubai. We’re also committed to embracing new technologies, driving digital transformation, protecting data as a strategic priority, and using technology to boost productivity.”

To support this exciting new era, the BMC IT team must ensure that critical infrastructure can cope with the rising demand. With data growing at an estimated 20% per year and expected to rise sharply once the new college is open, the organization took stock of its data resilience measures. 

“Our previous tools supported earlier phases of growth, but with expansion, we needed a unified and scalable solution,” said Alsanbi. “We were looking for more scalability and granular control of data backup and recovery. We targeted a single data resilience solution for our entire hybrid environment, which would put us in the best position to support the growing business.”

To enable unprecedented data resilience for a hybrid IT environment, BMC selected Veeam. The organization chose Veeam over competing solutions from vendors, including Commvault.

“Veeam was the best option for us because it’s designed to work seamlessly for data in the cloud and on-premises,” said Alsanbi. “It outshone other data protection vendors because it is so easy to use and simple to deploy. Veeam doesn’t require any special training or advanced skills to set up and manage — any member of our IT team can quickly learn how to get the best out of the technology, making it a great investment for BMC.”

BMC deployed Veeam to protect its on-premises Windows and Linux servers, alongside virtual machines hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud. It also chose Veeam to safeguard its business-critical Microsoft 365 data and opted for Veeam Data Cloud Vault — a fully managed, secure cloud storage resource — to store its backups.

“Veeam gives a single point of control for data resilience across all our workloads,” said Alsanbi. “We protect more than 10 TB of data, the most critical of which we back up multiple times a day. We’ve adopted the 3-2-1-1-0 rule: making three copies of our data, stored on premises, in Veeam Data Cloud Vault, and offsite, including immutable and offline storage — and we check every day to ensure that there are no errors. Veeam Data Cloud Vault gives us greater confidence that are backups are more secure than ever before without the headache of managing the storage ourselves.”

BMC is now better positioned to take on growth opportunities, with a scalable data resilience architecture that is designed for easy integration with a range of other technologies. 

“One of the best things about Veeam is that it doesn’t limit you — in fact, it empowers you,” said Alsanbi. “We have no doubts it will scale to accommodate our fast-growing data, even when we open our new colleges and it rises suddenly, and that it will align with our future roadmap.”

Using Veeam, BMC has improved its ability to respond in the event of any incident affecting its IT services, such as unexpected outages or potential cyber threats, helping us maintain strong business continuity. 

“It used to take us as long as two hours to get a vital system back online,” said Alsanbi. “With Veeam, we can recover the data we need in just 15 minutes, which is a reduction of over 87%. On average, we estimate that Veeam has slashed our data recovery times by 80%, which is a huge boost to our business continuity.”

BMC is also taking advantage of built-in automation tools in Veeam to increase efficiency. The organization is seeing significant improvements in everything from its backup times to storage utilization.

“A workload that previously took an hour to back up now takes just 30 minutes with Veeam,” said Alsanbi. “Overall, Veeam has reduced the time and effort we spent on managing data resilience by around 80%. And the storage compression feature has driven down our storage requirements by as much as 80% in some cases. We’re putting these extra resources toward strategic goals such as IT optimization and cybersecurity initiatives, helping BMC take on new opportunities for advancement.”

• Scales seamlessly to enable rock-solid resilience for data growing at 20% per year and accelerating
  BMC is now better positioned to take on growth opportunities, with a scalable data resilience architecture that is designed for easy integration with a range of other technologies.
• Slashed data recovery times by 80% to minutes rather than hours
  “Shortly after deploying Veeam, our systems experienced a hardware issue,” said Alsanbi. “Thanks to Veeam, we recovered vital services in just 15 minutes, minimizing disruption to users and saving our developers from rebuilding a business-critical environment from scratch.”
• Cut backup times by 50%, data protection workload by 80%, and storage requirements by up to 80%
  “Veeam is freeing up resources that we’re putting to work for the benefit of BMC and its users,” said Alsanbi. “Next, we’re exploring options like Veeam Backup for Microsoft Entra ID as part of our ongoing security roadmap, as we know our user IDs are a magnet for cyberattacks, and we trust Veeam to help us keep them safe.”