Case Study: Smoky Lake County protects emergency services and saves $27,000 with Veeam Backup Essentials (Veeam)

Veeam helps Smoky Lake County fight wildfires and keep residents safe

Smoky Lake County, a sparsely populated municipal district in Alberta covering 3,400 km² and home to about 5,000 residents, needed reliable protection for the IT systems that support critical services like automated water dispensing, fire and rescue — especially given the region’s wildfire risk. Their legacy Windows Backup was slow and unreliable, recoveries were unpredictable, and the county faced legal requirements to retain and recover records under the Access to Information Act, putting residents and operations at risk.

The county replaced legacy backup with Veeam Backup Essentials, which now protects 3 TB across their Microsoft Hyper‑V environment and safeguards mission‑critical systems such as GIS, Exchange and SQL Server. Veeam’s Explorer tools and Instant VM Recovery delivered fast, reliable restores (including two full email recovery incidents), helped the county meet compliance obligations and avoided a $27,000 expenditure on a redundant email server — giving IT staff confidence and dramatically faster recovery times.

Smoky Lake County

Brian Niziol

IT Technician