Case Study: British Columbia Forest Practices Board achieves reliable, fast recovery and optimized hybrid-cloud data management with Veeam

British Columbia Forest Practices Board optimizes data management with Veeam, NetApp ONTAP, Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier

The British Columbia Forest Practices Board is an independent public watchdog that audits forest practices across 24.3 million hectares. The Board relies on field-collected data for audits and public reporting, but its legacy backup solution was unreliable (about a 50% recovery rate), didn’t integrate with NetApp ONTAP, and left business continuity and disaster recovery at risk—potentially forcing costly repeat fieldwork.

The Board replaced legacy backup with Veeam Availability Suite integrated with NetApp ONTAP and now backs up 69 VMs (9 TB) from NetApp snapshots hourly and replicates to a DR site every four hours. Veeam Instant VM Recovery cut RTOs from hours to minutes, enabled RPOs, saved the team 12–15 hours weekly, and archives backups to Amazon S3 and Glacier for scalable, cost‑effective long‑term retention.

Forest Board Practices

Tim Slater

Manager, Corporate Services and Information Systems