Anglicare Southern Queensland increases ransomware protection and data security with Veeam

The Business Challenge

Anglicare Southern Queensland began 150 years when five pioneering women founded the Female and Infants Refuge in Brisbane. From those humble beginnings Anglicare Southern Queensland expanded care services to all vulnerable people. Today the organization helps one in 30 Queenslanders.

Anglicare Southern Queensland is one of the state’s most trusted nonprofits. Like all nonprofits, Anglicare Southern Queensland needs to be prepared for cyberattacks because they’re increasing in the nonprofit sector.

“One of our top priorities is protecting the systems and data that support the care we provide to clients,” said Chris Williams, Technology Services Manager at Anglicare Southern Queensland. “We’re doing everything we can to protect against cyberattacks and ransomware, so one of the first things we did was replace our legacy backup solution with a mature, enterprise-grade solution with cloud backups.”

“Veeam came out on top, especially with regard to security, speed, recovery and storage flexibility,” Williams said. Testing was a critical part of their decision making.

“Immutable backups are great, but they’re pointless if the data you restore is corrupted. Testing backups to verify their recoverability and scanning for malware before recovering data are just as important. Veeam delivers on all these points and more, including protection for our historical data as we transitioned to Microsoft Office 365.”

The Veeam solution

Anglicare Southern Queensland chose Veeam Availability Suite and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 to boost ransomware protection and data security. Veeam provides immutable backup copies in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and automated testing for secure restore. It also supports data retention and recovery compliance and delivers complete protection, access and control of Office 365 data.

“There’s nothing more important than protecting the systems and data that enable our organization to care for clients at every stage in their life’s journey,” Williams said. “That’s why we chose Veeam. It’s a mature, enterprise-grade solution that delivers on security and ransomware protection.”

Veeam protects more than 100 TBs of data in several critical IT systems for client relationship management, health record management and human resources management. Veeam backs up almost 200 virtual machines as well as physical machines on-premises and sends backup copies to Amazon S3 for immutability and to Azure for redundancy. Veeam also sends backup copies to Amazon S3 cloud storage for indefinite retention.

“Veeam is fast, efficient and easy to use,” Williams said. “Our backup window decreased by 89% (from three days to eight hours), but what impresses us is Veeam DataLabs for backup testing and security.”

DataLabs enable Anglicare Southern Queensland to create isolated virtual labs outside of the production environment to test the recoverability of backups and scan for malware (Secure Restore) before recovering data. DataLabs also offer On-Demand Sandbox to test software patches and updates before deploying them.

“We use On-Demand Sandbox to test SQL updates,” Williams said. “The database is rather large at 1 TB, so what used to take days to test updates now takes a few hours with Veeam.”

Williams said recovery is faster too, taking minutes rather than hours or days.

“Veeam provides peace of mind across the board, but we notice it the most often when we have to recover something to a specific point in time. Veeam lets us drill down to a single item so easily. When one of my colleagues told me that Teams files could end up lost if you saved a file wrong and overrode the original files, I said ‘No worries, we have Veeam.”

The Results

• Boosts ransomware protection with Amazon S3 immutability and Secure Restore
  “Security is our highest priority for data, so Veeam not only provides immutable backups, but it also tests them for recoverability and scans them for viruses before we restore from them,” Williams said.
• Supports data retention and recovery compliance
  “One of the things we like best about Veeam is fast, easy granular recovery for compliance purposes,” Williams said.
• Provides complete protection, access and control of data in Microsoft Office 365
  Microsoft provides a wide array of powerful services within Office 365, but comprehensive backup isn’t one of them. Veeam protects Office 365 data from accidental deletion, security threats and retention-policy gaps.