Mediclinic Middle East drives down Recovery Point Objective dramatically with Veeam

The stand-out healthcare providers of today work hand-in-hand with the latest technology. From artificial intelligence and big data analytics to wearable IoT devices, cutting-edge solutions are stepping out of sci-fi movies and into hospitals, clinics and home medical settings.

As a leading innovator, Mediclinic Middle East is on a mission to bring the very latest developments in healthcare to its patients. To lay the groundwork for its transformation into a technology-driven healthcare provider, the group is introducing automation, AI and other technologies, and has centralized its Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems for all the clinics and hospitals in its network. At the same time, Mediclinic Middle East is pursuing opportunities for growth via acquisition, most recently adding an at-home healthcare provider to the family.

“Mediclinic Middle East is always evolving,” said Raziel Peña, ICT Operations Manager at Mediclinic Middle East. “From our most recent facility, Mediclinic Parkview Hospital in Dubai to our latest in-home healthcare acquisition, we’re extending our reach to help more people live happy and healthy lives across the continuum of care. In the ICT team, our challenge is to ensure we can maintain the exceptional standard of care we’re known for, while making the most of limited resources. After all, hospitals never sleep.”

As data volumes exploded, Peña and his team felt the pressure. They embarked on a business-wide review of IT, aiming to identify opportunities for optimization. Disaster recovery (DR) emerged as one area that Mediclinic Middle East could do better.

“Acquisitions have a way of shining a light on your established ways of doing things,” said Peña. “When you’re blending another company’s operations into your own, it’s a great time to stop, take stock and decide whether your approach is as good as it could be.”

He continued: “We discovered that our growth was outstripping our data protection measures. We had more than one data backup tool in use in the group and didn’t know how long it would take us to recover if we were hit by a cyber-attack or natural disaster, for example. At Mediclinic Middle East, we don’t shy away from change, so it was time for a fresh new approach."

To retain its position at the forefront of healthcare innovation, Mediclinic Middle East chose Veeam to support always-on data availability across its diverse and growing operations. Using Veeam, the group established a one- stop solution for all backup and DR

“Veeam was one of the tools used by parts of Mediclinic for a while, but we soon realized it should be our data protection solution of choice,” said Peña. “When we compared Veeam to the other options, its extensive feature set stood out. Add to that how scalable and flexible Veeam is, and it’s the ideal solution for our fast-expanding organization.”

Today, Mediclinic employs Veeam to back up more than 620 virtual servers, which host critical applications such as Mediclinic Middle East’s EHR, medical imaging, Research and Development (R&D) applications and more. For added resilience, Mediclinic Middle East uses Veeam to create a full backup of its main datacenter in a co-located environment as well as a copy of the file servers installed in each clinic and hospital.

“We really like the hardened repository feature in Veeam, since it allows us to create immutable backups of our most critical systems and data,” said Peña. “With hardened repositories, we can be confident that all recovered data will be intact and ready to use if we ever need to restore it. Thanks to Veeam, we feel a lot more prepared should the unexpected happen.”

Using the Continuous Data Protection (CDP) feature built into Veeam, Mediclinic Middle East is driving down its Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for its VMware virtual machines dramatically. Later in the year, the group is planning to do a lift-and-shift migration of its core systems to a co-located environment and will use CDP to keep key IT services available as it carries out the move.

“Working in healthcare means data loss could potentially impact a life and death scenario,” said Peña. “Features like CDP are why Veeam is so critical to the central mission of Mediclinic Middle East. Veeam makes short work of complex data management tasks, so that our relatively small IT team can serve a dynamic and growing business.”

With so many successes with Veeam under its belt, it’s no surprise that Mediclinic Middle East also chose Veeam to protect its Microsoft 365 applications.

“While Microsoft offers perfectly good native backup capabilities, we feel much more confident using Veeam to back up the sensitive files and confidential emails we share via Microsoft 365 apps,” said Peña. That’s because the built-in tools permanently delete files in the recycle bin after a time period set by Microsoft, but with Veeam we get to decide when they’re gone forever.”

By seizing control of data with Veeam, Mediclinic Middle East is ready for the next phase of its growth strategy. And when the group encounters bumps in the road, it knows that Veeam will always be on hand to help.

“Veeam provides excellent, responsive support,” said Peña. “They even developed new security patches for us in less than two weeks when we needed them. By helping us run smoothly with minimal maintenance, Veeam frees us up to focus on what’s next for Mediclinic Middle East. Whether that’s introducing exciting innovations at our existing locations or a brand-new opening.”

• Supports exceptional healthcare 24/7 by driving down recovery point objective (RPO) significantly. 
  By allowing us to minimize data loss if we’re hit by a major incident, Veeam helps us to keep our services running smoothly at all times,” said Peña. As we scale up our operations, we’re using Veeam to ensure our data protection capabilities keep pace with our evolution and advances in healthcare technology.”
• Facilitates high service continuity by equipping the Mediclinic Middle East IT team with rapid access to support. 
  The team put the responsiveness of Veeam to the test when it requested custom security patches — and Veeam delivered in less than two weeks.
• Reduces IT costs by providing a consolidated, centralized dashboard across services, facilitating day-to-day operations support, and freeing more resources for innovation. 
  By replacing two backup systems with a single, integrated platform from Veeam, Mediclinic Middle East achieved significant savings on software licensing costs, while also reducing IT maintenance workloads and adding new functionality