CHU Dijon-Bourgogne deploys Veeam to safeguard critical medical data and maintain quality of care

From electronic patient records to digital medical imaging, data is at the heart of patient care; hospitals must ensure that administrators and clinical staff have reliable access at all times. For CHU Dijon-Bourgogne, the challenge is compounded by the need to support a large cohort of practitioners, students and researchers, who absolutely need access to historical data stretching back many years for medical monitoring, analysis and research.

“Our medical services run 24/7 so our information systems must also be available 24/7,” said Thomas Bouchet, Systems Engineer at CHU Dijon- Bourgogne. “Of course, having high-availability systems with rapid automated recovery is just one element: we also need to protect against disaster by backing up everything and ensuring that systems can be reliably restored.”

Outside of its production landscape, CHU Dijon- Bourgogne introduced a Scality object storage solution for long-term archival of Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) data including medical imaging such as CT and MRI scans, sleep monitoring data and pathology data. The organization wanted to ensure that this archived data was also protected against corruption or loss.

“Whether it is NAS data or our production landscape, we need to protect against accidental deletions and corruption by malware,” said Thomas Bouchet. “Even if you have high-availability clustering, you still need the ability to recover systems from backups in case the worst happens.”

CHU Dijon-Bourgogne has used Veeam technology for almost a decade to protect its high-availability production landscape.

“We have a very good relationship with Veeam and with our Veeam partner X9000,” said Thomas Bouchet. “Veeam provides comprehensive protection for our most important systems and data, with advanced defenses against malware, but it’s also easy to use and manage.”

The organization’s approach to backup has evolved significantly, from a single level of backup on a deduplication array to today’s 3, 2, 1, 1, 0 rule (3 different copies of data, on 2 different media, 1 of which is offsite, 1 of which is offline, and using backup recoverability verification to ensure 0 errors).

“It previously took two days to restore a 2 TB virtual machine, but it takes just two hours now — a 96% improvement,” said Thomas Bouchet. “A single 100 GB virtual machine can be recovered in less than 10 minutes.”

CHU Dijon-Bourgogne recently enhanced its Veeam backup system with NAS backup of data hosted on object storage infrastructure, an effective way to strengthen the protection of archive data against the risks of corruption and loss for years.

“The legal retention period for medical data is 20 years after a patient’s most recent visit. And, of course, historical data is extremely valuable for medical researchers. For these reasons, we have implemented data backup via the Veeam and NAS solution,” said Thomas Bouchet.

With Veeam providing rapid, reliable and above all recoverable backups of CHU Dijon-Bourgogne’s entire infrastructure, the organization is confident that it is protected against even the worst- case scenario.

“Maintaining high availability and a secure infrastructure is our first line of defense, but backup is also critical to deal with the possibility of a cyberattack,” said Thomas Bouchet. “We can never be 100% sure, but we know that Veeam can help us avoid nasty surprises. We add to the security by encrypting backups and keeping them outside of our Active Directory environment. And our offline tape backup gives us an immutable, air-gapped final layer of protection.”

In addition to using SureBackup functionality in the Veeam solution to automate recoverability testing for its virtual machines, CHU Dijon- Bourgogne annually tests the recovery of one complete application as part of internal and external auditing.

“Backup security is a particularly strong point with Veeam,” said Thomas Bouchet. “We have a statutory obligation to ensure that systems recovered after a cyberattack are scanned for malware, which is an automated feature within Veeam.”

• Cuts restore times by 96% and enables recovery of 100 GB virtual machine in less than 10 minutes. 
  It previously took 2 days to restore a 2 TB virtual machine, but CHU Dijon-Bourgogne can now achieve recovery in just two hours.
• Accelerates backup, enabling full daily backups of nearly 1 PB of data. 
  Gives CHU Dijon-Bourgogne peace of mind that its large and rapidly growing data landscape is protected against corruption of loss.
• Provides confidence that backed-up data and systems are fully recoverable. 
  SureBackup functionality in the Veeam solution automates recoverability testing for virtual machines to give confidence that backups are ready to recover.