RCTCBC uses Veeam to reduce costs as resident and customer data services increase

Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council (RCTCBC) continually looks to enhance service levels for local residents. However, RCTCBC also must contend with contracting budgets and inflationary pressures. To achieve both goals, RCTCBC is encouraging residents to access services online, leading to over 170,000 service- related interactions via its website each year.

“Over the last few years, we’ve been evolving into a data-driven council,” said Gareth Pearce, Head of Technology at RCTCBC. “Our goal is to harness data to make stronger, more resident-centric decisions. As a result, data is critical to delivery of all our services, and we must always protect it.”

RCTCBC’s previous data protection tool was already a significant cost for the IT team. When the council embarked on a cloud-first strategy, it realized that extending its existing data protection capabilities to the new environments would drive costs higher still. So, RCTCBC decided to find an alternative that could meet its current and emerging requirements.

“Our legacy backup toolset was becoming an aged technology running on aged equipment,” said Gareth Pearce. “Costs were escalating, and we knew that there must be a more economical option than the licensing based on storage volumes. When the time came to renew, we decided to look closely at the market for a potential replacement.”

RCTCBC chose Veeam to ensure a high level of continuity for council services and fast responses to residents. The organization drew on analyst reports and staff experiences to make its selection.

We looked at Gartner and Forrester reports and talked to other local authorities about their experiences,” said Gareth Pearce. “Veeam quickly emerged as a frontrunner. We selected Veeam because of its superior functionality, ease of management and cost-effectiveness.

RCTCBC quickly realized that Veeam would have a positive impact on its budgets, with the move cutting the council’s annual backup and recovery costs dramatically.

“Veeam reduces our yearly backup and recovery costs and offers a strong future roadmap, which makes a massive difference,” said Gareth Pearce. “When you take into account the fact that we have also gained a host of new modern capabilities,Veeam is a big win for the council and the residents we serve.”

With Veeam, RCTCBC has simplified data protection management significantly, empowering its IT team to respond faster to requests from the business.

“The Veeam user interface is so much simpler than our previous tool,” said Gareth Pearce. “Managing backups and recovering data is no longer limited to specific members of the IT team — now almost anyone can do it. When we rolled out Veeam, we were nervous about how it would be received as people generally don’t like change. But everyone was pleasantly surprised by how easy Veeam is to use and adoption was painless.”

Now that RCTCBC can recover data rapidly and efficiently with Veeam, the council is ensuring that employees have everything they need at their fingertips to provide high levels of service.

“We frequently use Veeam to recover data that has been accidentally deleted,” said Gareth Pearce. “We can also do it quicker and without the need for deep technology expertise.”

As RCTCBC progresses on its cloud-first journey, it is looking to Veeam to provide centralized data protection. The organization is also setting up recovery orchestration with Veeam, which will help it to automate some of its DR processes and facilitate better, faster service continuity.

“We recently started using Veeam to back up some of our Microsoft 365 data for a partner,” said Gareth Pearce. “When we realized that we could manage data protection for Microsoft 365 using the same management console as our on-premises systems, that was a big plus. Veeam protects a wide range of workloads seamlessly, ensuring we have solid data protection no matter where we take our digital roadmap next. We’re now setting up recovery orchestration with support from both Veeam and the Veeam community, which have both proven super helpful.”

• Large savings on annual backup and recovery costs free up limited funds. 
  Under constant pressure to do more with less, using Veeam will lead to service improvements.
• Facilitates staff training with an intuitive and easy- to-use data protection solution. 
  “The Veeam user interface is so much simpler than our previous solution,” said Gareth Pearce. “The Veeam user interface is so much simpler than our previous solution. Managing backups and recovering data is no longer limited to specific members of the IT team — now almost anyone can do it.”
• Accelerates data recovery and backup, contributing to high levels of service continuity. 
  The team at RCTCBC can now respond faster to requests from business users to recover accidentally deleted data or restore business-critical systems in the event of a disaster.