Laurentius Hospital protects patient data and boosts cyber- resilience with Veeam

In an environment where healthcare organizations are under constant pressure to do more with less, innovation is vital. For Laurentius Hospital in the Netherlands, the key is to make smarter use of digital technologies to transform its operating procedures and boost efficiency.

“With an aging population, we’re facing an ever- increasing demand for healthcare,” said Frank Soons, ICT Manager at Laurentius Hospital. “At the same time, we are expected to do more with fewer staff and less resources. Digitalization is essential.”

However, as hospitals grow ever-more reliant on digital systems and data, the reliability, availability and security of those systems become paramount. Cybercriminals now regularly target healthcare organizations with ransomware and other attacks. And in response, both the Dutch government and the European Union are introducing strict new standards for cyber resilience, such as NEN 7510 and NIS2.

“Effective backups are a key aspect of resilience against cyberattacks, hardware failures and other outages,” said Soons. “But our existing backup tools were quite complex, and only one of our system administrators was a real expert in how to use them. We wanted a simpler, more intuitive solution that would empower our whole team to back up and restore data whenever necessary.”

As a long-time NetApp customer, Laurentius Hospital looked for a backup and recovery solution that could integrate seamlessly with its existing storage environment and take advantage of features such as NetApp snapshots. With the help of its technology partner Insign.it, the hospital evaluated a range of potential solutions and ultimately selected Veeam Data Platform Advanced.

“On a functionality level, the Veeam solution achieved the best scores,” said Soons. “Veeam is so simple to use, we knew for certain that our whole team would be able to work with it. And Veeam’s ability to back up data from one environment to another fits perfectly with our cloud strategy.”

Insign.it helped the ICT team implement Veeam and upgrade its NetApp storage landscape, creating a highly secure infrastructure. Veeam backs up data to two separate physical locations, where it is stored as immutable copies that will prevent data corruption in the event of a ransomware attack. In particular, this means that sensitive patient data from the hospital’s ChipSoft electronic medical records system is fully protected.

“With Veeam and NetApp, all data and all applications across the whole hospital are now in one storage environment, backed up with one backup solution,” said Soons. “We’re seeing faster performance, easier administration and greater flexibility. We can fit the backup policies to the requirements of each application, so we can always guarantee acceptable RTOs for our users.”

• Reduces RTO for mission-critical workloads to just 15 minutes. 
  Veeam helps us tailor our backups to the needs of each application,” said Soons. “For some systems, daily backups are enough — but for the most critical workloads, we can replicate data every 15 minutes and ensure extremely fast recovery.”
• Enables one-click restoration of data for virtual machines. 
  Prior to adopting Veeam, restoring data to a virtual machine was a multi-step process. Today, the ICT team can restore data with high precision — down to the level of individual — with a single click.
• Empowers the whole ICT team to take ownership of backups. 
  Instead of being reliant on one backup expert, all four of our system administrators can now take ownership of our backup processes,” said Soons. “That means it’s not just our infrastructure that’s more resilient — our whole ICT organization is more resilient too.”