The Malaysian Administrative Modernization and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) keeps vital government services running smoothly by achieving 99.5% system availability with Veeam.
Citizens throughout Malaysia use a range of digital tools to access healthcare and education services, file their taxes, manage their businesses and much more.
As the IT services provider for the public sector, the Malaysian Administrative Modernization and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) is responsible for ensuring that the applications and infrastructure supporting all government activities run smoothly around-the-clock. To achieve this, the organization operates Malaysia’s Public Sector Data Center, which comprises over 3,000 servers and is used by more than 200 agencies.
“Any unplanned downtime could have a huge impact on the delivery of vital public services,” said the Government Data Center (GDC) team at MAMPU. “To prevent disruption, we have committed to provide every government agency with a service level agreement [SLA] of 99.5% availability for all of the IT systems and applications they use.”
Robust and reliable backup and recovery capabilities are MAMPU’s last line of defense against unplanned downtime and, as such, play a crucial role in delivering on its key availability SLA.
“Many of the services we provide to government agencies run on virtual machines, and each month we create up to 20 new virtual machines to meet rising demand,” said the GDC team. “With our virtual environment expected to expand further in the months ahead, we recognized that our existing backup solutions simply weren’t cost-effective or scalable enough to support future growth.”
As well as limiting MAMPU’s scalability and flexibility, IT experts at the organization found that they need faster recovery for each virtual machine, if unplanned downtime were to occur.
To find the best backup and recovery solutions for its growing IT infrastructure, MAMPU launched a formal tender process and evaluated offerings from a range of vendors, including Veeam.
“We selected Veeam Availability Suite because it is entirely hardware agnostic, offers an incredibly user-friendly interface and provides flexible licensing options,” said the GDC team. “And the fact that we would be able to achieve ISO 27001 compliance with Veeam was a huge plus, as all Malaysian government agencies are required to meet this high standard.”
One of the largest instances of Veeam Availability Suite in the public sector, MAMPU’s Veeam environment backs up over 12TB of mission critical data and 616 virtual machines. Currently, the organization backs up data to its main on-premises data center and then replicates these backups to a secondary location.
“Moving to Veaam solutions has helped to greatly improve capacity planning,” said the GDC team. “With VeeamONE, we can easily get rapid insight into the current status of our backup environment and leverage near real-time data to support more informed strategic decisions.”
Impressed with its experience of Veeam solutions, MAMPU plans to upgrade to the latest version of the Veeam Availability Suite in the months ahead, which will unlock more opportunities for the organization to develop its backup and recovery environment.
“We’re excited to take advantage of the latest features provided by Veeam,” said the GDC team. “For instance, we plan to roll out the Continuous Data Protection tool to achieve an even lower recovery time objective for our virtual machines. And to further strengthen data protection, we plan to establish a hardened repository for our most sensitive workloads and datasets – increasing our protection from cyberattacks.”
The results
- 100% faster restore of VMs strengthens Business Continuity:
“By reducing recovery times from two hours to under 60 minutes for our virtual environments with Veeam, we’re much better placed to reduce service disruption from unplanned downtime. This empowers government agencies to deliver reliable, responsive services to citizens,” said the GDC team. - 99.5% availability SLA achieved with Veeam solutions:
Since moving to Veeam solutions, MAMPU has successfully maintained its record of always exceeding availability targets – driving consistently excellent client service. - Supports seamless infrastructure growth, delivering value for citizens:
“Veeam’s flexible licensing allows us to protect our workloads without worrying about future growth or infrastructure changes,” said the GDC team. “Ultimately, this frees up more resources, which we can divert to transforming the delivery of citizen services across Malaysia.
