Morehouse School of Medicine Chooses Veeam

Veeam Software, Inc. announced that Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM) chose the vendor to replace 2 unreliable backup solutions and modernize its data protection strategy to defend vs. growing cyber threats.

With ransomware attacks in the education space proving to be highly lucrative for hackers, MSM needed to improve its DR strategy and placed its trust in Veeam to protect its critical data assets.

It is among the nation’s leading educators of primary care physicians, biomedical scientists and public health professionals. An independent, private and historically Black medical school, it works diligently to increase patient access to high-quality care and eliminate health disparity in underserved communities. When it decided to be proactive about defending vs. ransomware, the IT department realized its legacy backup solutions weren’t equipped to handle cyber-attacks – they were unreliable, difficult to use and expensive. That’s when MSM turned to Veeam Availability Suite as a more affordable, efficient and secure solution, saving $75,000 in backup costs and 500 hours of IT management each year.

Availability Suite attaches the monitoring capabilities of Veeam ONE to the powerful data protection features of Veeam Backup & Replication in one enterprise bundle to meet both protection and analytics needs.

“After attending VeeamON, I knew immediately Veeam was the right choice for MSM. It’s the only product I’ve ever used that does exactly what it says it will do – every single time. It’s precisely what we needed to boost our DR strategy,” said Mark Dean, senior systems administrator, MSM. “Veeam supports our mission for health equity by helping us protect vs. cyberattacks – while saving us time and money.“

Ransomware attacks vs. universities increased by 100% in 2020, with the average cost to recover being $447,000. MSM knew that it was a matter of when, not if, it would experience a potentially devastating phishing attack – it only takes one student or faculty member clicking on a phony link. With Veeam, MSM can create air-gapped tape backups to recover from these attacks quickly and avoid paying ransom.

Veeam backups and replicates nearly 1PB of data for MSM across more than 400 VMs on-premises and to a private cloud, while also monitoring and reporting on the efficacy of each backup job. Veeam copies backups to tapes that are stored off-premises, making them air-gapped so MSM can follow the 3-2-1-1-0 rule (3 different backup copies on 2 different media with 1 copy offsite, 1 copy air-gapped, immutable or offline and 0 backup recovery errors). Veeam also backups VMs in Azure Active Directory, which enables users to sign in and access critical education resources such as Office 365.

Working with Veeam lets MSM focus on its health equity mission, giving the university peace of mind that it won’t be the next victim of a malicious ransomware attack. By being proactive with its DR strategy, MSM is also assured that when the inevitable attack does happen, data can quickly be recovered without disruption to its students, faculty or staff.