Protecting the public: Insiel speeds recovery for vital public services with Veeam resilience

Insiel develops and maintains the ICT platforms and infrastructure that support all regional, healthcare, and local government digital services in Friuli-Venezia Giulia.

“We serve a wide range of stakeholders, including all 215 municipalities, health authorities and hospitals, as well as numerous other regional instrumental bodies,” said Furio Accerboni, Data Center Services Area Manager at Insiel. “Because our infrastructure supports critical public services, 24/7 availability is a key goal.”

Insiel designs its infrastructure with redundancy and separation between sites in mind, to ensure resilience and recovery of essential services. A team of ICT specialists oversees the operation, maintenance, and management of services and infrastructure components.

“We are continually looking for ways to innovate our solutions and bring new and better services to residents across Friuli-Venezia Giulia,” said Accerboni. “As we invest in our digital capabilities, it’s becoming all the more important to ensure that our services are resilient, recoverable, and well protected against cyberthreats.”

To help achieve its data resilience goals, Insiel decided to move away from its legacy backup tool.

“Over the years, our infrastructure has evolved significantly, with an increase in services and business continuity requirements," said Elvis Cossetti, ICT System Specialist at Insiel. "The previous solution provided us with reliability for a long time, but the changing environment led us to seek a more modern and flexible approach to data protection and recovery."

Following a competitive bidding process, Insiel selected Veeam to enhance data protection and improve recovery processes. Veeam Data Platform ensures continuity and recovery of workloads between separate sites, while Veeam Kasten for Kubernetes integrates protection for containerized applications.

“We drew up a detailed set of specifications for the tender based on an in-depth assessment of our environment and interviews with our stakeholders,” said Accerboni. “Of all the vendors who took part in the tender, Veeam scored the highest across our key selection criteria.”

Partnering with Sinthera, a trusted Veeam partner, gave Insiel more than implementation support — it unlocked a strategic review of backup and retention practices. Together, they transformed outdated policies into clear, efficient retention standards that cut storage costs and strengthened compliance.

"With increasing workloads and protection requirements, it was important to make retention management more efficient and consistent,” explained Cossetti. “The new platform has allowed us to consolidate retention rules into a more standardized set, improving governance, control, and resource utilization."

Insiel's infrastructure, based on hundreds of ESXi hosts, includes approximately 4,900 VMs running Linux and Windows operating systems, 65,000 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes, and several petabytes of data on shared storage supporting public services. Veeam is used as the central platform for protecting and recovering key workloads.

In a complex and highly segmented infrastructure, it was important to have clear processes and reliable tools for data resilience. Veeam, with the support of Sinthera, made it possible to achieve these goals, while simplifying management.

Veeam also enables Insiel to improve the efficiency of routine tasks. With unified observability from Veeam ONE, the company can rapidly create reports on key metrics such as recovery point objectives and user access controls. Insiel can also delegate recovery tasks to additional members of the IT team, helping to reduce bottlenecks and increase service responsiveness for end users.

“We are now allowing some of our healthcare users to perform backups and restores independently for the first time,” said Accerboni. “With Veeam, our users have the freedom to schedule their jobs whenever they choose, add workloads to their backups, and recover data on demand. We’ve only just begun, but the feedback we’re getting is extremely positive.”

“With the new platform, we have streamlined backup and recovery processes and made them more manageable,” said Accerboni. “In addition to protection, it is essential for us to be able to restore services quickly when necessary. With Veeam, we have strengthened data resilience and significantly reduced recovery times for mission-critical workloads.”

• Reduction in data recovery times
  With Veeam, authorised users can now log in and recover data without the assistance of a central team — removing bottlenecks and elevating responsiveness.
  
• Improvement in cost-efficiency
  Insiel offers its stakeholders specific retention policies, helping to avoid data sprawl and reduce storage costs.
  
• Decrease in risk by boosting overall resilience
  Using Veeam, Insiel defines data resilience policies that align with regulatory requirements, helping it to enable compliance while ensuring data integrity, availability, and security.