City of Fort Lauderdale Reduces Data Recovery Time by 95% Using Veeam

Veeam^® Software, the #1 leader by market share in Data Protection and Ransomware Recovery, today announced that the City of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has deployed Veeam Data Platform and Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 to enable high-speed recovery of vital data anywhere in the city's hybrid cloud infrastructure. With Veeam, the city has reduced recovery time by 95%, providing secure, flexible protection of data against cyberattacks and natural disasters.

In today's security landscape, organizations face the challenge of trying to keep operations up and running, while also fending off ransomware attacks. Over the past twelve months, 76% of organizations were attacked at least once in the past 12 months, and 26% of those reported being attacked at least four times.ⁱ Facing additional risks of data center outages from severe weather events along Florida's coast, the City of Fort Lauderdale implemented Veeam Data Platform Premium Edition and Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 to upgrade the performance of its backup solutions.

"If only we had deployed Veeam citywide before the historic flash flood in 2023," said Tamecka McKay, CIO, City of Fort Lauderdale. "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."

Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 operates in the cloud, allowing users to securely back up Office 365 to any location, whether that be on-premises or in cloud object storage, including locations like Amazon S3, Azure Blob, IBM Cloud or S3 compatible providers. In this case, it allowed Veeam to back up 8.5TB of on-premises data to ExaGrid appliances and made backup copies immutable in Azure Blob.

To further support the city, Veeam will back up its data in Microsoft 365 to Azure Blob because reliable restore is critical for the city. For example, granular recovery of historical emails will ensure the city maintains legal compliance with Florida's Sunshine Law and recovering SharePoint will ensure the city's intranet is always available.

Along with meeting the city's requirements for secure, flexible data protection, Veeam helped Fort Lauderdale standardize, modernize and centralize its disaster recovery and future business continuity efforts plans.

"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."

Veeam solutions also enabled Fort Lauderdale to meet its cybersecurity insurance requirements with encryption and immutability. Veeam delivered cyber resiliency through recovery verification, instant recovery at scale, infection-free recovery, inline malware detection and DR orchestration.

"At Veeam, we understand how keeping municipal services up and running is paramount, especially in the event of a debilitating power outage or cyberattack," said Shiva Pillay, General Manager and Senior Vice President of Americas at Veeam. "We're proud that Veeam's backup and disaster recovery solutions have helped the City of Fort Lauderdale properly protect its data and get systems restored after any emergency."

For more details on the Fort Lauderdale program and Veeam, visit https://www.veeam.com/success-stories/city-of-fort-lauderdale.html.

Registration is now open for the 10th annual VeeamON event, taking place June 3-5, 2024, at the Diplomat Resort in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and online. Register now for a limited-time 10-year anniversary rate: https://www.veeam.com/veeamon.

About Veeam Software

Veeam^®, the #1 global market leader in data protection and ransomware recovery, is on a mission to help every organization not just bounce back from a data outage or loss but bounce forward. With Veeam, organizations achieve radical resilience through data security, data recovery, and data freedom for their hybrid cloud. The Veeam Data Platform delivers a single solution for cloud, virtual, physical, SaaS, and Kubernetes environments that gives IT and security leaders peace of mind that their apps and data are protected and always available. Headquartered in Seattle with offices in more than 30 countries, Veeam protects over 450,000 customers worldwide, including 74% of the Global 2000, who trust Veeam to keep their businesses running. Radical Resilience starts with Veeam. Learn more at www.veeam.com or follow Veeam on LinkedIn @veeam-software and X @veeam.

ⁱ Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2024; https://go.veeam.com/wp-data-protection-trends-2024