Case Study: National Library of Scotland achieves rapid recovery and ransomware-resilient immutable backups with Veeam

Preserving Scotland’s past, present and future The country’s national library rises to the challenge with Veeam

The National Library of Scotland, which curates some 50 million items and serves millions of online visitors, relied on 110 VMware VMs and Microsoft 365 apps to deliver public and back‑office services. Facing growing data volumes, fragmented backup tools, tape‑based processes that strained network capacity, and rising ransomware risk, the Library needed a simpler, more reliable and future‑proof data protection strategy that reduced manual effort and improved recoverability.

The Library deployed Veeam as a unified data protection platform for on‑prem VMs and Microsoft 365 (backing up ~370 TB on‑prem and ~9.5 TB to AWS), using disk‑based and immutable backups across geographically separate sites. The change automated backups, freed roughly 10 hours per week of IT time, and dramatically improved resiliency—RPO improved from 14 days to 24 hours (93% better), RTO fell from three hours to about 10 minutes (95% better), and critical servers can now be recovered from immutable backups in minutes.

National Library of Scotland

Alastair Sommerville

IT Infrastructure Manager