On the morning of March 6, 2024, the city of Birmingham, Ala., was hit with a ransomware attack.
"It was a day that will live in infamy,” says Birmingham CIO Darryl Burroughs. “The city completely came to a halt.”
Most of Birmingham's computer systems were knocked offline, forcing employees to use paper to submit timesheets and perform other functions. Some systems took days to achieve a full recovery.
The event disrupted business continuity, but there were two silver linings for Birmingham. First, the city had immutable backups of all of its data and could restore those backups quickly. As a result, it didn’t have to respond to ransom demands. Å few years prior to the breach, Burroughs and his team consolidated multiple backups into a single Veeam solution.
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“I tremble to think about using our previous backups in this situation,” he says. “It was such a difficult time, so it was great to have experienced partners working beside us. They gave us confidence to trust the process and move through it to fully recover.”
Second, since the event, the city has begun an aggressive migration to the cloud, which has simplified recovery processes.
“We’ve migrated approximately 90% of our applications to the cloud,” Burroughs says. “And moving to the cloud made everything a lot simpler for us.”
Consolidating Backups Boosts Data Resilience for Critical Systems
Birmingham’s backups support all of the city’s key departments, including transportation, human resources, finance, and approximately 800 police officers and 700 firefighters.
“There's really nothing in our city that can function as it should without having the technology available to them,” Burroughs says.
At the start of 2022, the city had been leveraging multiple providers to back up approximately 100 terabytes of data. Recovering from those backups was unsustainable.
“The amount of time our systems admin spent trying to recover the system was demoralizing to them, and put us in a position where we were constantly being reactive,” Burroughs says. “We often had backups fail, and trying to work with support was a nightmare.”
For the consolidation effort, Burroughs was drawn to Veeam Data Platform for a few reasons. Veeam was more affordable than other bidders by $50,000, and could easily support Birmingham’s hybrid IT environment.
“Our hybrid environment didn’t make it any more difficult — it's just a matter of pointing, and the configurations were super simple,” Burroughs says. Veeam’s intuitiveness was another key selling point.
“For recovery, there are no more than seven clicks of a wizard to bring data back,” says Rick Vanover, vice president of product strategy for Veeam.
Burroughs estimates the immediate savings to be $100,000, but says the real value saved is more likely in the millions of dollars.
“We’re in a much better position because we know that we have our data regardless of what happens, and that alone is worth millions,” Burroughs says. “But then you also have the savings FTEs; it was ridiculous the amount of time equated to money that we spent on FTEs working on backups.”
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A Cloud Journey Toward Greater Cyber Resilience
Birmingham’s cloud migration began in March 2025. Burroughs moved quickly because his leases were lapsing for hyperconverged infrastructure and storage devices at the same time as the city’s contract with its colocation provider.
“My goal was to have all of those ending at the same time, and then take that money and spend it on the subscription costs for Azure Cloud,” he says.
Azure doesn’t allow unsupported operating systems or outdated applications, so the migration has also forced the city to modernize its tech stack, which included outdated applications and unsupported OSs.
“All of that is creating a scenario that puts us in a better position from a security and data recovery standpoint,” Burroughs says.
To help earn buy-in and support, Burroughs spearheaded the creation of a steering committee composed of key stakeholders from different departments within the city, including police and fire, human resources and other entities.
“It’s one thing to know what to do, but it's another thing to get it done and have these strategic intentions pushed through the organization with cooperation,” Burroughs says. “From the senior executive level, the steering committee is a more holistic, enterprise approach that's necessary to make sure you always prioritize the things you need to prioritize.”
