Future-Proofing Public Services: Central Coast Council Scales Data Resilience with Veeam

There’s a lot happening in the Central Coast region of Australia. Millions of tourists flock to the area each year, and 100,000+ new residents are expected by 2030. Central Coast Council, the governmental entity tasked with providing essential services in the region, is determined to rise to the challenge.

“We’re a unique organization in that we look after water supply and sewerage alongside the usual council services of housing, waste and recycling, road maintenance, sustainability programs, and so on,” said Vince O’Carroll, Section Manager, IT Operations at Central Coast Council. “With big population growth on the horizon, we must scale up our services while controlling costs and meeting a host of regulatory requirements. Our answer to that was undertaking a large-scale digital transformation.”

As part of this initiative, Central Coast Council put its data resilience measures under scrutiny and decided it could do better. The organization’s IT team targeted next-level capabilities that didn’t blow the budget.

“We have approximately 250TB of data that’s growing at roughly 5 to 10% each year,” said Chris Peacock, Technical Operations Lead at Central Coast Council. “As a local government organization, financial sustainability is a critical factor in every decision we make, which is extra challenging when we’re seeing IT costs rise across staff, skills, and licensing.”

He continued, “With cybercriminals becoming more opportunistic, regulators asking more of us, and being based in one of the most natural disaster-prone regions in New South Wales, it wasn’t the time to rest on our laurels. We wanted stronger resilience for our data, and we wanted it as soon as possible.”

Central Coast Council achieved next-level data resilience by expanding its use of Veeam. The organization set the foundations for its cloud-first strategy by consolidating on Veeam for data backups and recovery.

“After a data-loss incident caused by our on-premises hardware not scaling as we needed, it was clear we had to accelerate our digital transformation,” said Peacock. “We put the project out to tender and chose Cloud Context, a Veeam partner we trust, to help strengthen our Veeam capabilities. The long-term cost efficiency offered by Veeam was a deciding factor in our choice. With plans to migrate workloads to Azure and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) over the next two years, having Veeam’s protection — no matter where our data resides — was absolutely critical.”

Central Coast Council introduced the 3-2-1-1-0 Rule and increased retention times for its most critical data using Veeam. With Veeam Vault, the organization gained fully managed, air-gapped, cloud-based storage for its backups, lightening the load on the IT team and solving scalability issues. Central Coast Council also gained data resilience for its business-critical Microsoft 365 applications with Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365. Using Veeam, the council cut the number of data resilience implementations it has to manage, including for its primary and disaster recovery environments, from many to one, dramatically reducing administrative effort and complexity.

“The biggest change from consolidating our data resilience with Veeam is the speed of recovery,” said O’Carroll. “I sleep much better at night knowing that data is being backed up reliably with Veeam, and — crucially — that we can recover it rapidly whenever needed. Before this project, we didn’t even back up our Microsoft data, for example, so the difference is huge. By boosting data resilience, Veeam is helping to make interruptions to our services a thing of the past.”

By raising its game with Veeam, Central Coast Council is both mitigating the risk of impact from a successful cyberattack, simplifying regulatory compliance and future-proofing against natural disasters like bushfires and flooding. The organization is also investing in preserving its most precious resource — residents’ trust.

“All our backups are now encrypted and immutable with Veeam,” said Peacock. “That gives us great peace of mind and helps us demonstrate that we’ve matured our cybersecurity measures to the regulators. Since we’re classified as a critical entity under the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act (SOCI) in Australia, we’re under pressure to maximize our resilience. Veeam is helping us rise to that challenge.”

O’Carroll said, “As a government entity, our most valuable currency is trust. Veeam helps us preserve the trust that our community puts in us to protect their data and ensure that services run without pause. We’re better prepared for the expected influx of new residents, with highly scalable, powerful data resilience from Veeam.”

• Minimizes interruptions to essential services, including water supply and sewerage
  Comprehensive data protection and rapid recovery enabled by Veeam helps the council deliver stellar services round-the-clock.
• Protects Microsoft 365 data at the click of a button, with minimal configuration needed
  “Before this project, we didn’t even back up our Microsoft data, so the difference is huge. We can now protect our Microsoft 365 data at the click of a button,” said O’Carroll.
• Helps to maintain residents’ trust in the Council and its services
  “As a government entity, our most valuable currency is trust,” said O’Carroll. “Our investments in Veeam are helping us preserve the trust that our community puts in us to protect their data and ensure that services run without pause.”