Case Study: City of Sarasota avoids $34M ransom and ensures uninterrupted city services with Veeam

$34 million in ransom NOT PAID by the City of Sarasota thanks to cybersecurity strategy powered by Veeam

The City of Sarasota, a Gulf Coast municipality of about 56,000 residents, had digitized many public services but faced critical data-protection gaps after its previous backup solution began failing. When attackers encrypted three file servers and demanded $34 million in ransom, the city risked major service disruptions and extensive data loss.

Sarasota implemented Veeam Availability Suite and Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, adopting a 3-2-1-1-0 strategy with offsite Azure and immutable, air-gapped backups plus SureBackup and Instant VM Recovery. The team recovered infected servers without paying ransom, kept services uninterrupted, protected roughly 60 TB of VM/on‑prem data and 22 TB of Microsoft 365 data, and strengthened compliance with Florida’s Public Records Act.

City of Sarasota

Herminio Rodriguez

Director of IT