Veliko Tarnovo Municipality implements automated backup and recovery solution reducing capital investment

Located in the central part of Northern Bulgaria, Veliko Tarnovo has a population of around 72,000. It is the 15th largest city in the country, and the Yantra River, one of Bulgaria’s longest, meanders through the town. Like many government agencies, Veliko Tarnovo Municipality had an antiquated backup system. The agency lacked automation and used custom scripts to run manual backups of their main physical servers with only local archiving capabilities.

We needed an automated backup and recovery solution that didn’t require a large capital expenditure,” stated Pavel Hristov, Ph.D., Head of the IT department of Veliko Tarnovo Municipality. “In addition, we wanted a higherlevel cybersecurity to protect our constituents’ data, and we got that with Acronis Active Protection.”

As a public agency, Veliko Tarnovo Municipality is entrusted with sensitive constituent and personnel data. That puts it under the scrutiny of compliance regimens like GDPR — aimed at protecting sensitive private data and at risk of fines and other sanctions if it fails to protect that data against theft, tampering or loss. Municipalities face dual pressures: they must defend themselves against cyberattacks like ransomware that seek to profit from their privacy protection obligations and must preserve the trust of their constituents. Veliko Tarnovo was licensing a legacy, signature based antivirus product along with a manual backup and needed to protect its data further, thus requiring a more robust cyber protection solution.

Veliko Tarnovo Municipality partnered with managed security service provider Diamatix to implement Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud with Advanced Backup and Active Protection. The implementation took Diamatix only three days, including a demo session for the city’s IT personnel. The same Acronis agent that handles backup and recovery uses artificial intelligence to monitor a machine’s data operations in real time. It constantly scans data input and output activity to identify anomalous or suspicious activities typical of ransomware and other malware attacks, such as the mass encryption of files.

For example, if a process tries encrypting data or injecting malicious code, Acronis Active Protection immediately stops that process and notifies the admin that it has identified suspicious activity. The administrator then chooses to block that activity by adding it to the denylist, or enable it by adding it to the allowlist. If any files were altered or encrypted before the attack was detected and terminated, Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud automatically restores them from a local cache — thereby undoing any adverse effects of the attack.

The city now has an automated, scheduled-based backup, recovery and cybersecurity solution that supports Veliko Tarnovo’s 19 virtual machines and three physical servers. Monthly and weekly backups of over 1.30 TB are seamlessly and automatically executed to cloud archive storage. Diamatix provides support and monitoring services and oversees backup and recovery to and from a secure cloud location in Frankfurt, Germany.

“The combination of Diamatix professional services and Acronis Cyber Protect solution provides Veliko Tarnovo Municipality with a healthy and CyberFit environment.”

- Pavel Hristov, Ph.D., Head of the IT department

Implementing Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud with Advanced Backup and Active Protection has dramatically increased Veliko Tarnovo’s IT efficiency, compliance and #CyberFit score. Before implementation, the municipality’s IT department was manually running backup scripts, but now can rely on a fully automated backup regimen. The team now secures all sensitive constituent data and increases compliance by adding cybersecurity and offsite backups via the cloud. Raising its cybersecurity posture has elevated Veliko Tarnovo’s #CyberFit score to 625/850. Other benefits include cost-effectively offloading support, reporting, monitoring and other professional services to Diamatix. “Our future plans include implementing endpoint advanced protection for all workstations using Acronis products with assistance from Diamatix,” said Hristov.