Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust is responsible for managing ever-growing sensitive patient data. With many systems critical to day-to-day operations, losing access to data is increasingly unimaginable for the Trust’s 6,000 users.
“A system outage could cause patient issues and prevent medicine being prescribed,” said John Lau, Server Engineer at the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust. “Even historical records are crucial because doctors need to see notes from previous appointments when assessing patients’ needs.”
Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust backs up data for hospitals and 50 clinics. Each clinic had an on-site server that the team backed up to tape. This caused difficulties for reception teams as they had to manually replace the tapes, often resulting in lengthy phone calls with the Trust’s IT team to troubleshoot issues.
Previously, the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust used a variety of backup solutions including Quest NetVault and Veritas Backup Exec for its physical servers, and Veeam for its virtual environment.
“We’re just a team of eight, which made it a challenge to make sure backups are complete within scheduled windows,” said Lau. “With data availability critical to both employees and patients, and the risk of cyber-attack growing, we wanted to consolidate on one single, powerful data protection solution.”
Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust chose Veeam to enable it to deliver high-quality patient care round- the-clock. The organization made the decision based on a recommendation from its long- standing partner, PrimeSys.
“Veeam was the best option for consolidating our approach to data protection because we knew firsthand that it offered high performance and efficiency,” said Lau. “Since first deploying it six years previously, Veeam introduced a feature that allows us to back up VMs directly to tape, which is a big plus for us.”
With fewer data protection systems to manage, the Trust’s IT team saved time immediately. Veeam became a ‘set and forget’ solution that always completes backups for both hospitals and clinics in the scheduled timeframes. The Trust now stores 30 days of data on fast-access ExaGrid storage, which has cut data recovery times significantly.
“Rather than the time-consuming process of finding the right tape to recover data, we now have much more granular, automated recovery capabilities thanks to Veeam,” said Lau. “It now takes us hours instead of days, which makes a big difference to seamless healthcare delivery.”
The Royal Wolverhampton Trust has also automated data protection for the 50 clinics it supports in the local area. The move is saving time and minimizing disruption for both the Trust’s IT team and the clinics’ on-site employees.
“Instead of local clinic teams managing on-site backups to tape, we now handle this centrally using Veeam,” said Lau. “As a result, clinic employees can focus on their daily roles and not worry about interruptions to data availability. It also means they’re not calling us with queries, tying up the phone line that patients call in on. And Veeam makes the process so simple that the overall administrative burden on our team is less even though we’ve taken on more responsibility.”
With healthcare ransomware stories often making the news, security is a huge priority for any NHS trust. Veeam is contributing to the confidence Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust has about its data storage.