Veeam protects life-saving services and delivers cyber resiliency to CMSU Behavioral Health & Development Services

Each year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services releases the results of a national survey detailing mental illness and substance use levels. On average, one in four people is affected by mental illness and 16% of the U.S. population meets the criteria for a substance use disorder, including 29 million people fighting alcohol use and 24 million battling drug use.

What’s more daunting is that 12.3 million people consider suicide, 3.5 million make suicide plans and 1.7 million attempt suicide. Fortunately, organizations like CMSU offer tremendous help to people in crisis. One example is the TAPline emergency phone service. It’s available 24/7 so consumers have immediate and confidential access to crisis counselors. Law enforcement and first responders use TAPline too. Crisis counselors help them triage situations to ensure proper care is delivered.

“TAPline saves lives,” said Matthew Urbanski, Systems Administrator at CMSU. “Our job is to make sure TAPline is always accessible, so the systems supporting it must be backed up reliably, and backups must be recoverable.”

Reliable, recoverable backup was a challenge when CMSU used Unitrends.

“We ran into a random situation where a backup wasn’t recoverable,” he explained. “Although we didn’t need to recover anything critical, that situation was a wake-up call.”

The IT team considered Acronis as a replacement for Unitrends but Acronis didn’t provide the level of confidence CMSU requires for data security, data recovery and data freedom. Next the team contacted Winslow Technology Group, which recommended Veeam^®.

“They had amazing things to say about Veeam, and they were absolutely right,” Urbanski said. “Veeam instills 100% confidence that data is backed up securely and reliably for fast recovery and gives us the freedom and flexibility to back up anything anywhere.”

CMSU replaced Unitrends with Veeam Data Platform Advanced Edition for secure backup, replication, immutability, verified recoverability and proactive monitoring, reporting and analytics. Later when CMSU transitioned to Microsoft 365, the IT team deployed Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365.

“Most people don’t think of Microsoft 365 as having life-saving capabilities, but it does,” Urbanski said. “Our staff uses Exchange and OneDrive for Business to securely share consumer data with local hospitals and law enforcement when people require treatment.”

Veeam protects the services that help CMSU improve and save lives.

In addition to TAPline, Veeam backs up a proprietary electronic healthcare record system containing consumers’ medical histories, as well as a system called Laserfiche that scans and stores consumer’s paper healthcare records.

“Once paper records are scanned, the paper is destroyed, so having recoverable backups is critical,” Urbanski explained. “Microsoft 365 backups are just as critical. When someone goes to the ER, the hospital contacts us about their health history. Exchange and OneDrive enable us to securely send consumer data that helps medical professionals deliver the best treatment.”

Veeam also helps CMSU meet cyber insurance requirements for immutability and 3-2-1-1-0 compliance (3 different copies of data on 2 different media with 1 copy offsite, 1 copy air-gapped, immutable or offline and 0 recovery errors). Veeam supports CMSU’s compliance with HIPAA and OCR too. Here’s how: Veeam backs up 6TB across virtual machines, physical machines and Microsoft 365 several times each day. Backups are made immutable to protect against ransomware attacks, while advanced monitoring, reporting and analytics help the IT team detect malicious activity so CMSU can maintain recovery compliance.

“I sleep better at night because of Veeam,” Urbanski said. “It anchors our business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy, and it delivers cyber resiliency. We are fully confident our backups are secure and recoverable. Knowing Veeam protects everything that keeps CMSU running is a great feeling.”

• Verifies backup recoverability and restores quickly and securely at scale 
  Veeam protects every service we provide, including our crisis phone service,” Urbanski said. “Crisis counselors are available 24/7 to provide confidential help, support and a path forward when people are struggling. Veeam is doing its part to help CMSU save lives.”
• Meets cyber insurance requirements for immutability and the 3-2-1-1-0 Rule 
  Immutable backups offer benefits in addition to cyber resiliency — data integrity, data security and data corruption prevention. Veeam scans backups to verify they’re free of malware before recovery.
• Supports CMSU’s compliance with HIPAA and OCR 
  Navigating compliance standards isn’t easy, but Veeam makes it easier with built-in encryption, immutability and advanced monitoring, reporting and analytics for auditing.