Hato Hone St John is a New Zealand charity that provides ambulance services, first aid training, event medical services and community programs across the country. With 4,000 full-time employees and over 8,000 volunteers, the organization has been operating for over 130 years.
Services from Hato Hone St John are a lifeline to communities across New Zealand. Alongside its ambulance services, the organization is the country’s leading provider of wearable medical alarms, and practically all its services depend on digital technology. As a result, Hato Hone St John aims to ensure always-on availability for its IT platforms.
Andrew Fletcher, National Technology Infrastructure Manager at Hato Hone St John, said, “We rely on an extensive IT estate to support our work, and extended periods of unplanned downtime could potentially be a matter of life and death.”
To ensure high performance and availability for its mission-critical systems, Hato Hone St John periodically refreshes its IT infrastructure. As the organization prepared to deploy new data center hardware, it decided to seize this opportunity to strengthen its approach to data protection.
“Healthcare organizations are becoming increasingly popular targets for ransomware — and over the years, we’ve experienced direct attacks on our systems,” said Fletcher. “For that reason, it’s vital that we can effectively backup and restore our key services.”
In the past, Hato Hone St John leveraged a BaaS solution combined with on-premises tape storage to protect its systems. While the previous approach was effective, it was also time-consuming, costly and labor intensive. To address these challenges, the organization started to look for a more efficient way to safeguard its IT platforms.
By partnering with Veeam, Hato Hone St John has gained a highly flexible and cost-effective solution to protect its systems from end-to-end.
“With Veeam Data Platform, we realized that we could streamline our data protection processes while significantly improving our overall security posture,” said Fletcher. “By using service-level immutable backups from Veeam in combination with HPE data storage servers, we can protect around 1,000 VMware virtual machines (VMs) and 3,800 employee workstations against ransomware attacks.”
Working with Veeam Platinum Partner Lexel Systems, Hato Hone St John configured Veeam to protect more than 151 TB of active data, with an additional 141 TB allocated for backup storage.
Like many organizations, Hato Hone St John augments its on-premises systems with cloud solutions and relies on Microsoft 365 productivity apps, Microsoft Azure and Salesforce CRM. Impressed with Veeam’s ease of use, the organization decided to build on its success by deploying Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure and Veeam Backup for Salesforce.
“By using Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365, we can augment the native data restore capabilities of Microsoft 365 with Veeam backups, stored securely in the Azure cloud,” said Fletcher. “We also use Veeam to protect our customer relationship management data in Salesforce. Deploying Veeam was extremely straightforward, and we were able to start backing up our Microsoft 365 and Salesforce environments in a matter of days.”
Today, Hato Hone St John is leveraging Veeam to do more than protect its mission-critical data. For example, the organization’s security team uses Veeam to compare current and past versions of its Microsoft Active Directory database to verify that old user accounts have been deprovisioned.
Hato Hone St John leverages Microsoft Azure to deliver 24/7 availability for its wearable medical alarms. When the CrowdStrike incident brought down Microsoft Windows environments around the world in 2024, Hato Hone St John needed to act fast to restore its Azure environment. With Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure, Hato Hone St John successfully recovered its Azure systems in under five hours, which minimized system downtime and the amount of risk for medical alarm users.
“We’ve only scratched the surface of what Veeam can do, but we’re already measuring significant improvements,” said Fletcher. “By replacing tape backups with automated data protection from Veeam, we’re saving a great deal of time. We can now devote these resources to value-added work such as proactive system monitoring, security enhancements and new digital projects.”
Crucially, Hato Hone St John can protect its vital digital systems more effectively than ever. “Since deploying Veeam, we’ve cut both our recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTOs and RPOs). Without a doubt, Veeam plays a key role in protecting the systems we depend on to deliver life-saving care to people across New Zealand.”