INDUSTRY OUTLOOK
“ Our job is to help keep city services running all the time , particularly in the event of a crisis ,” said Herminio Rodriguez , Information Technology Director for the City of Sarasota . “ We were using a product that was unable to meet the city ’ s data integrity needs in any way , shape or form because it began to fail , putting city services in jeopardy .”
If we hadn ’ t been able to recover our servers , we would have had massive data loss affecting all facets of the city .
After spending three days on the phone with the backup vendor , Rodriguez said he and his team downloaded a free trial of Veeam Availability Suite . Within 30 minutes they configured Veeam and began the first of many reliable backup jobs .
“ We started using Veeam to keep city services running and support Digital Transformation of future services , but
Veeam ’ s true test came a year later when cybercriminals attempted an attack on our city ,” Rodriguez said . “ They encrypted three file servers supporting city services and demanded US $ 34 million in Bitcoin . Rather than risk city services , we recovered our file servers with Veeam . Not one service or resident was impacted and we avoided paying the ransom . If we hadn ’ t been able to recover our servers , we would have had massive data loss affecting all facets of the city and ultimately it would have impacted our residents .”
Soon Sarasota tapped Veeam for additional ransomware protection . The IT team began www . intelligentfin . tech
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