Case Study: Children’s Mercy achieves 500+ admin hours saved per month and faster, more reliable recovery with NetApp AltaVault

Children’s Mercy Saves More than 500 Hours by Moving to Cloud Backup

Children’s Mercy is a standalone pediatric hospital in Kansas City pursuing a cloud-first digital transformation under CIO David Chou. Its legacy tape backup environment was time-consuming, slow to restore (24–36 hours), and required overnight monitoring by a dedicated team, creating an operational bottleneck as the hospital moved to become more data-driven.

The hospital replaced tape with NetApp AltaVault appliances that deduplicate and compress backups before sending them to Microsoft Azure (while keeping 90 days locally), integrated with existing Veritas NetBackup. The change eliminated tape, cut backup times by about 60% (one daily job dropped to 2.5 hours), reduced restores to under an hour, saved 500+ admin hours per month, and freed six FTEs for higher-value work—improving reliability, security posture, and progress toward a hybrid cloud strategy.

Children’s Mercy

David Chou

VP, CIO, and CDO