Empowering healthcare continuity: How Dedalus achieves end-to-end data protection with Veeam

When your software is the backbone of healthcare, data resilience is non-negotiable. Developing solutions that support millions of patients every year, Dedalus cannot afford data loss or downtime.

“Data is more than a business asset for us; it is the lifeline of our customers,” said Ronald Duprier, Backup and Storage Manager at Dedalus IT Group. “If we experienced significant data loss or downtime, it would be catastrophic.”

Operating in the healthcare space means Dedalus must comply with strict data privacy and long-term archiving rules, some of which mandate retention for up to a decade. Plus, the ever-present risk and growing threat of ransomware further heightens the need for robust security and drives close collaboration with information security teams.

These are complex challenges for any organization, but even more so for one that’s expanding as rapidly as Dedalus. Over the past decade, Dedalus has completed 80+ acquisitions to build a sprawling infrastructure across Europe and beyond.

“Our rapid growth created a vast infrastructure, where data resides across a diverse range of platforms, both on-premises and in the cloud,” said Duprier. “To secure our complex landscape and deal with many converging pressures, we needed a comprehensive data resilience platform and a true strategic partner.” 

Together with Veeam, Dedalus created a centralized data backup and recovery strategy for its global operations. Veeam safeguards 6,000+ virtual servers running Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL databases, hosted on 200+ physical machines. Veeam also helped Dedalus upgrade its storage infrastructure to incorporate Pure Storage for production, NetApp for backups, and ECS for archiving.

Alongside this extensive on-premises landscape, Dedalus leverages Veeam to secure its data across a hybrid cloud environment. Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 protects over 600 TB of data across email, OneDrive, and SharePoint while Veeam Backup for Microsoft Entra ID secures identity and access data for 10,000 user accounts.

The Veeam technical account manager (TAM) service was instrumental.

“Our Veeam technical account manager has become part of the Dedalus family,” said Duprier. “He knows our environment inside out and brings the high-level vision we need to unlock maximum value from our Veeam investments.”

Veeam was also key to Dedalus’ recent move to AWS. With Veeam, Dedalus can easily externalize data from AWS to on-premises infrastructure to avoid vendor lock-in and ensure flexibility. Veeam's built-in compression and deduplication capabilities significantly reduce data volumes and egress fees to make the company’s cloud model more cost-effective.

“The data that we externalize from AWS is already compressed with Veeam,” said Duprier. “On top of that, Veeam applies a special deduplication algorithm to further reduce data volumes. For example, starting with 4 MB, we might only transfer 1 MB. When dealing with terabytes, the savings are substantial.”

Dedalus continues to expand its Veeam environment by leveraging its advanced security capabilities. All backups are encrypted, and immutable backups prevent critical data from being altered or deleted, which is essential for defense against both external and internal risks.

“Veeam immutable backups don’t just safeguard us against external threats like ransomware,” said Duprier. “They’re essential for protecting ourselves from accidental deletions or mistakes that can happen internally.”

Dedalus plans to implement Veeam SureBackup to automate the verification of its restores too, a key capability that will streamline recovery validation for internal and external auditing purposes. The company is also migrating more operations in India and Italy onto its central infrastructure, which will more than double its current footprint.

Dedalus’ confidence in Veeam is born of experience. Following a storage failure that took down 40 productive VMs, Dedalus used Veeam Instant Recovery to restore all systems over a single weekend, and business resumed as normal on Monday.

“With Veeam, resilience isn’t a promise — it’s a reality,” said Duprier. “That certainty lets us focus on what matters most: growth and innovation.”

• Proactive data protection across a large, hybrid environment
  Dedalus counts on Veeam to secure thousands of virtual servers and hundreds of terabytes of data across on-premises data centers and multiple public cloud platforms.
• 75% data compression rate minimizes cloud egress fees
  Veeam’s built-in data compression and deduplication features support efficient data externalization, allowing Dedalus to move workloads from cloud to on-premises with less expense and effort.
• Rapid data restore guards against business interruptions
  “Veeam Instant Recovery is an amazing feature,” said Duprier. “We can recover and run workloads from backup storage almost immediately, ensuring minimal disruption. Later on, we can move workloads to our production infrastructure and complete the restore process.”