Municipality Protects Public Services with Veeam

The Business Challenge

Sweden’s 290 municipalities provide a wide range of public services to nearly 10 million people. The best way to ensure public services proceed without interruption is to protect the IT infrastructure that supports them. For most municipalities, this means reevaluating backup and recovery in their IT infrastructures.

Karlshamn Kommun found itself reevaluating backup and recovery following a digital transformation to VMware vSphere. The IT team was using two backup solutions—one for virtual machine backup and another for file-level backup— because neither solution could do both adequately.

“We were doing double backup, which required more time, additional effort and extra backup storage,” said Einar Berntsson, Systems Engineer at Karlshamn Kommun. “We didn’t mind the added work, but backup and recovery were slow and complicated. We didn’t want to put public services at risk.”

No municipality wants to put public services at risk. Public services must be available when they are needed, including health care for the elderly.

“Nurses provide in-home care 24.7.365, which means they require access to patients’ health records 24.7.365,” Berntsson said. “If the databases containing health records fail, we have to be able to recover them fast so nurses can provide care to patients.”

Another important public service is education. Karlshamn Kommun provides schooling for 6,000 students, and each child receives a computer. The IT team backs up students’ computers and each school’s education management system. Data must be available when students and teachers need access to it.

“Supporting the delivery of public services is a major part of our job in IT,” Berntsson said. “If the IT systems that support public services aren’t backed up reliably and recovered quickly, we’re not doing our job. Doing double backup wasn’t the best use of our time or resources.”

Berntsson and his colleagues found a solution that is worth their time and resources: Veeam Backup & Replication.

The Veeam Solution

There’s a reason more than one-third of Sweden’s 290 municipalities use Veeam: Veeam helps them ensure availability of public services. Public services are vital to the social fabric of each community.

“Public services are only valuable to residents if they’re available, and Veeam helps us make sure they’re available,” Berntsson said.

Veeam provides Karlshamn Kommun with additional benefits. After a CryptoLocker virus took control of an employee’s computer, Veeam recovered every encrypted file from a backup. No data was lost and no ransom was paid, thanks to fast, reliable backup and recovery.

Fast, reliable backup and recovery also enable Karlshamn Kommun to meet recovery time and point objectives (RTPO). Before deploying Veeam, the IT team struggled to meet RTPO.

Veeam saves Karlshamn Kommun time and money too. Recovery is 50 percent faster with Veeam, saving the IT team more than 250 hours each year. And, Veeam is 25 percent less expensive than the previous backup solutions. That savings, combined with a 50 percent savings in backup storage (the IT team performed double backup before Veeam, plus Veeam has built-in deduplication and compression) adds up to hundreds of thousands of Kronor each year.

“Veeam is fast and easy to use—that’s the reason for our success,” Berntsson said. “Saving time and money gives us the opportunity to consider additional IT initiatives that will further protect and improve public services.”

Two of these initiatives are Veeam Backup from Storage Snapshots and Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots. Karlshamn Kommun’s virtual machines reside on Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) 3PAR StoreServ Storage, and Veeam offers highspeed backup and recovery from HPE 3PAR StoreServ snapshots, with no impact on the production environment. Veeam and HPE enable customers to reduce RTPO to fewer than 15 minutes.

The Results

• Ensures availability of public services
  Veeam protects public services by providing Karlshamn Kommun with fast, reliable backup and recovery. Not even ransomware could prevent Karlshamn Kommun from delivering public services.
• Recovers encrypted files from a backup quickly: no data lost, no ransom paid
  Ransomware is on the rise in the public sector, often infiltrating local governments. Files are encrypted and irretrievable unless an exorbitant ransom is paid. Karlshamn Kommun recovered encrypted files from a Veeam backup quickly and easily.
• Saves more than 250 hours and hundreds of thousands of Kronor each year
  Recovery is 50 percent faster with Veeam, saving time. Veeam is 25% more costeffective than legacy backup, saving money.