GORI keeps clean water flowing to hundreds of thousands of customers with data resilience from Veeam

Over a million people in Campania, Italy depend on GORI for their drinking water supply. The company is responsible for managing over 5,200 km of water distribution infrastructure, 13 water purification facilities and 200 sewage treatment sites.

Digital capabilities are at the heart of GORI’s work. From delivering data to field engineers to orchestrating water treatment and distribution, the company depends on its IT infrastructure to keep thousands of homes across its service area supplied with clean and safe water.

Paolo Cataldo, ICT Operations & Security Manager at GORI S.p.A., said: “Almost all our mission-critical business processes depend on data in one way or another. For example, we regularly perform laboratory testing on water samples to ensure quality and purity. And because we are a provider of critical national infrastructure, we must protect all our data in line with stringent regulatory requirements.”

In recent years, GORI has seen the cyber threat landscape evolve rapidly. As the risk of ransomware attacks grew, the company looked to strengthen its ability to back up and recover data in the event of a cyber incident.

“Cyber criminals and state actors are increasingly targeting utilities, which means it’s never been more important to protect our systems,” said Cataldo. “We already had a robust and disciplined approach to backing up data across our IT platforms, including virtualized on-premises servers and Microsoft 365 applications. We wanted to enhance our approach by creating immutable copies of our backups, stored off site.”

To augment its cybersecurity strategy, GORI decided to replace its existing backup tools with Veeam Data Platform. The company also selected Veeam Data Cloud Vault — a pre-configured and fully managed cloud storage solution that delivers immutable, logically air-gapped protection for its backups.

“When we started our search for a solution, Veeam stood out straight away as a strong contender,” said Cataldo. “As well as meeting all our key technical requirements, Veeam offered us a great deal of flexibility when it came to deployment, allowing us to bring our on-premises and cloud environments onboard step by step. Crucially, the solution also supports legacy operating systems, which we use for our water analysis applications.”

Working with Veeam, GORI configured Veeam Data Platform to automatically back up its on-premises systems and cloud applications. Veeam creates two copies of the data: one is stored on-site, and another resides off site on Veeam Data Cloud Vault. Today, the company uses the ultra-secure cloud repository to protect a vast amount of data.

“The implementation process was really easy, especially with the help we got from Veeam,” said Cataldo. “Throughout the process, experts from Veeam were on hand to provide us with support and training.”

Through its partnership with Veeam, GORI is enhancing its approach to data protection.

“We’ve significantly improved our data resilience with Veeam,” said Cataldo. “While our previous backup tools worked well, they required substantial time and effort to manage. Veeam Data Platform makes it much faster and easier to manage our data protection processes.”

With a secondary copy of backups stored offsite in an immutable format in Veeam Data Cloud Vault, the company more easily adheres to the 3-2-1-1-0 rule and has the ability to restore its systems rapidly in the event of a ransomware attack.

Cataldo said: “Veeam Data Cloud Vault runs on the highest-performance tier of Azure Blob Storage, which means we can restore our systems very quickly. We can also restore that data in a granular way, which enables us to recover accidentally deleted files in a matter of minutes.”

By combining enterprise-grade data protection capabilities with immutable cloud storage, GORI has peace of mind that its vital data is well defended against ransomware attacks.

"If the digital systems that control our water treatment infrastructure were hit by a cyberattack, the potential impact on service delivery could be massive,” said Cataldo. “With Veeam Data Cloud Vault, we have a fully managed and highly cost-effective solution to protect our mission-critical data and keep clean water flowing to the people we serve."

• Mitigates the risk of ransomware attacks with immutable cloud backups
  By storing a copy of its backups on a cloud platform architected to zero-trust security standards, GORI can ensure that its data is highly resilient against cyber threats.
• Facilitates regulatory compliance by following the 3-2-1-1-0 rule
  “Veeam Data Cloud Vault lets us create backups on two different storage platforms, one of which is both off-site and immutable,” said Cataldo. “With Veeam Data Platform, we have confidence that there will be zero errors with those backups.”
• Strengthens business continuity with a shorter RTO
  With copies of data on high-performance cloud storage, GORI can recover its on-premises systems and Microsoft 365 applications faster than ever in the event of a disaster scenario.