Safeguarding essential social services: Caritas Vienna strengthens data resilience with Veeam

Caritas Vienna supports people in a wide variety of life situations. From homeless shelters and food distribution to family services, childcare and youth work, the organization operates a broad range of social services and facilities.

To support this work, the IT team at Caritas Vienna manages a complex hybrid infrastructure with numerous applications and integrations. The team also provides IT services for Caritas Austria, which delivers international humanitarian and disaster relief worldwide.

Daniel Thaler, Head of IT Infrastructure at Caritas Vienna, says: “Our mission is to support people and make a meaningful difference in their lives. To achieve that, we needed stronger resilience and greater confidence that our critical data can be recovered quickly and reliably following a cyber incident or operational disruption.”

Thaler continued: “Digital sovereignty and data portability are critical for us as we continue to evolve our IT environment. We wanted a solution that gives us the flexibility to choose the best hypervisors for our workloads and budgets while ensuring dependable data resilience regardless of the underlying platform.”

To continue delivering essential social services without interruption, Caritas Vienna deepened its long-standing partnership with Veeam. The organization upgraded to the Advanced editions of both Veeam Data Platform and Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365.

Veeam Data Platform is operated in close collaboration with trusted partner VorNet Informatik as part of a managed service environment. This provides Caritas Vienna with enhanced capabilities to validate backup recoverability, verify backup integrity and strengthen protection across its backup infrastructure through automated testing and malware validation features. These capabilities also reduce operational complexity through streamlined expert service management.

Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 is consumed as a fully managed SaaS solution delivered directly by Veeam, delivering secure, cloud-native protection for Microsoft 365 data with integrated monitoring and management capabilities.

Thaler said: “By deploying Veeam Data Platform, we've strengthened our data protection strategy through verified recoverability, automated backup testing and improved visibility into the health of our backup environment.”

Caritas Vienna relies on Veeam to back up around500 virtual machines (VMs). Most of the systems run on premises with VMware vSphere virtualization, but some instances also run in the Microsoft Azure cloud.

Using Veeam ONE, part of Veeam Data Platform Caritas Vienna gains deeper visibility into its backup environment with centralized monitoring, reporting, and insights from Veeam Threat Center.

Caritas Vienna uses Veeam Data Cloud to enhance business continuity, backing up approximately 16,500 Microsoft Entra ID users, groups and policies. These backups include critical access policies that help Caritas Vienna enhance security with a zerotrust approach and help reduce operational risk.

Caritas Vienna is highly satisfied with its Veeam solutions and values the collaborative relationship with the Veeam team.

Thaler said: “Veeam is very proactive. The Veeam team regularly engages with us, shares new ideas, conducts on-site demonstrations and helps us identify opportunities for ongoing improvement and optimization.”

• Strengthens cybersecurity
  Caritas Vienna relies on Veeam to protect its Microsoft Entra ID data including complex conditional access policies that enable fast and granular recovery of mission-critical access controls.
• Futureproofs data resilience
  “Veeam helps us continuously validate that our backups are recoverable and free from known malware before recovery. With technologies such as SureBackup and Veeam Threat Hunter, we regularly test and verify our ability to restore critical systems when needed.”
• Enables comprehensive business continuity
  With Veeam, Caritas Vienna gets the data resilience capabilities it needs from a single, trusted partner. The solutions are easy to deploy and manage, allowing the team to use its time and resources more efficiently to help support people in need.