Case Study: Smoky Lake County achieves twice-as-fast backups and 50% storage savings with Veeam Backup Essentials

County Depends on Veeam Essentials to Protect Systems Delivering Gas, Oil and Water

Smoky Lake County, a rural municipal district in Alberta serving about 5,000 residents, relied on a small Hyper-V virtual environment to deliver critical services like oil, natural gas and bulk water dispensing. With a one-person IT team, the county struggled with slow, unreliable backups that consumed excessive storage, complicated recoveries (including Exchange email), and no easy monitoring or capacity planning.

The county deployed Veeam Backup Essentials, which was up and running in hours and delivered immediate benefits: backups became twice as fast and used 50% less storage (saving roughly $500/year), while built‑in deduplication, compression and agentless backups reduced network and disk usage. Veeam’s fast, reliable recovery (including instant VM and Exchange item restores), plus 24/7 monitoring, alerts and capacity‑planning reports, gave the IT technician confidence and complete visibility into the virtual infrastructure.

Smoky Lake County

Brian Niziol

IT Technician