City of Fort Lauderdale fights hurricanes, floods and cyberattacks with Veeam

Hurricanes and floods are all too common in Florida and cyberattacks are all too common in local government. Fort Lauderdale is cognizant of all three.

“The best defense in any disaster is secure, reliable and flexible data protection,” said Tamecka McKay, CIO for the City of Fort Lauderdale. “Our challenge was providing that level of protection for every city service.”

Fort Lauderdale had been using two different backup solutions. One backed up city hall services and the Veeam^® backed up police and public safety services.

“The solution backing up city hall services was good, but the version we used didn’t offer direct restore to Azure Blob,” McKay said. “It required additional steps, and that’s not how you want to spend your time during a disaster.”

Veeam, on the other hand, restores any backup anywhere in the city’s hybrid-cloud infrastructure. It also helps the team undertake another challenge: standardizing, modernizing and centralizing disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) plans citywide.

“Between Veeam and our incredibly talented IT team, city data is better protected in the event of a hurricane, flood or cyberattack,” McKay said.

Veeam meets the city’s requirements for secure, flexible data protection and reduces recovery time by up to 95%. Veeam also standardizes, modernizes and centralizes DR and BC, and it supports the city’s cybersecurity insurance requirements via data encryption and backup immutability.

“If only we had deployed Veeam citywide before the historic flash flood in 2023,” McKay said. “More than 25 inches of rain fell within five hours, so we lost power in one of the data centers. Power wasn’t expected to resume for two days, so we spent hours rerouting network connectivity to bring up systems supporting city services. Veeam would have restored our backups from Azure Blob in minutes, and many city services would have been restored in a shorter time frame.”

Cliff Albury, Chief Information Security Officer for the City of Fort Lauderdale, said being able to restore any backup anywhere is a big win. “I built an incident response plan based on that capability. We can quickly resume many city services with Veeam.”

Veeam backs up approximately 500TB of on-prem data to ExaGrid appliances and makes backup copies immutable in Azure Blob. Veeam also backs up data in Microsoft 365 to Azure Blob because reliable restore is critical for the city. For example, granular recovery of historical emails ensures the city maintains legal compliance with Florida’s Sunshine Law. Recovering SharePoint ensures the city’s intranet is always available.

“Veeam is modern, easy to use and incredibly reliable,” said Derek Richardson, Business Technical Manager for the city. “Before I began working for the city I used Veeam for 10 years, and there wasn’t a single time that backup or recovery failed. Veeam is that good.”

• Delivers secure, flexible data protection and slashes recovery time by up to 95% 
  Veeam gives us the flexibility we’ve never had before,” McKay said. “We can restore any workload to any target quickly, which is important when you’re recovering from a disaster.”
•  Standardizes, modernizes and centralizes disaster recovery and future business continuity efforts 
  There’s a saying that you shouldn’t let a good crisis go to waste, so we didn’t,” McKay said. “The catastrophic flood we experienced affirmed our decision that Veeam is the best solution for taking disaster recovery and business continuity to the next level.”
•  Supports cybersecurity insurance requirements with encryption and immutability 
  Veeam delivers cyber resiliency in several ways: recovery verification, instant recovery at scale, infection-free recovery, inline malware detection and DR orchestration.