Case Study: Wenatchee Valley College achieves ransomware protection and 300% faster recovery with Veeam

Veeam and ExaGrid protect Wenatchee Valley College from ransomware

Wenatchee Valley College, which serves more than 7,000 students across a 10,000-square-mile area in Washington, faced growing ransomware risk after a nearby college was hit. Its legacy Backup Exec and Dell storage were slow and unreliable, putting critical systems—student registration, payroll, VDI, Exchange/SharePoint/OneDrive—and regulatory compliance (FERPA, PCI-DSS) at risk, so the IT team reassessed disaster recovery and sought an air‑gapped, future‑proof solution.

The college replaced the legacy stack with Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 and ExaGrid, deploying an air‑gapped process with encrypted backups and ExaGrid Retention Time‑Lock. Protecting 24 TB across 125 VMs, the new solution uses Veeam SureBackup and Instant VM Recovery to validate and restore data up to 300% faster, secures against ransomware, supports compliance, and enables a move to cloud backup—restoring the college’s confidence in its ability to recover and resume operations.

Wenatchee Valley College

Steve Garcia

Information Security Officer