Trust starts with data: Southend-on-Sea City Council strengthens resilience to keep services reliable

Southend-on-Sea City Council serves a population of approximately 180,000 people living in one of the most densely populated areas of the UK, except London. To keep services running smoothly, the council relies on a wide range of digital tools. With significant changes ahead and budgets under constant pressure, the careful management of its technology estate has never been more critical.

“Our challenge is making the best decisions for the people of Southend-on-Sea without knowing what’s round the next corner,” said Richard Roberts, Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Southend-on-Sea City Council. “The Local Government Reorganization program and the fast-changing cyberthreat landscape means we must be prepared for anything. As a result, we prioritize tools that don’t lock us into a specific hardware or software platform and offer good value when considered in light of the possible consequences.”

The council’s IT team takes its responsibility to protect resident data very seriously. To ensure that data is both accessible and secure to their residents, the team looked to boost its resilience measures.

“When our security team told us that having immutable backups was a requirement rather than a nice-to-have, we knew it was time to step up our capabilities,” said Roberts. “We have vulnerable people depending on our services, so delays in accessing or losing data isn’t an option for us. Improving data resilience became our top priority.”

To support reliable local government services for the thousands of people that live in and visit Southend-on-Sea, the council chose Veeam to maximize their data resilience.

“We replaced our previous backup solution with Veeam and never looked back,” said Roberts. “Straight away, we saw an improvement in reliability, and it was so much easier to set up and manage backup jobs. Veeam ticked the box for immutable backups too.”

Southend-on-Sea City Council started its journey with Veeam by deploying it to protect approximately 500 VMware virtual machines (VMs) running on-premises. Over time, the organization has rationalized and modernized its IT environment, migrating workloads to the cloud so that it now has around 100 VMs on-premises and 100 in the Microsoft Azure cloud. It also extended its Veeam implementation to ensure rock-solid data resilience across this hybrid landscape.

“When we started using Veeam for our Azure workloads, a specialist from Veeam helped us optimize our implementation so that it was running as efficiently as possible,” said Roberts. “They also showed us how to extract those insights going forward so that we can continue to make improvements and drive down costs.”

Using Veeam Data Cloud Vault, Southend-on-Sea City Council now has an off-site, immutable and air-gapped repository for its Microsoft Azure backups, helping it reduce risk significantly.

“Veeam Data Cloud Vault has given us a cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) vault,” said Roberts. “Whereas before, all our backups were stored at two local sites, we now have a copy of our data in a highly secure location far from Essex. With Veeam taking care of all the maintenance and updates for Vault, we've gained great peace of mind.”

Veeam continues to impress the Southend-on-Sea City Council IT team with its ease of use and intuitive management. As the organization prepares for change, it sees the flexibility of Veeam as a key benefit.

“Veeam constantly stays ahead of market trends and industry challenges,” said Roberts. “We’re in a period of evolution at the council, and I’m confident that Veeam, with its hardware agnosticism and versatility, can adapt alongside us. With Veeam, we’re honoring the trust that people place in us to protect their data and use it responsibly. At the end of the day, that’s the only way to deliver reliable public services.”

• Optimizes the utilization of backup resources
  “Veeam gives us insights into where we're taking too many snapshots, so we can save money while maintaining ample protection for our most important data,” said Roberts. “By putting those recommendations into action, we’re getting better value for public spend.”
• Reduces risk of data compromise by adding extra layers of resilience
  Southend-on-Sea City Council now keeps a copy of its data in Veeam Data Cloud Vault, enhancing its ability to recover from a major incident.
• Saves time and increases satisfaction for users through a streamlined, intuitive interface
  “Comparing Veeam to our previous solution, the difference is like night and day,” said Roberts. “Veeam is so much more enjoyable and straightforward to use. It’s modern, slick, and continues to evolve over time.”