Turning Setbacks into Strengths: How Spring Branch ISD Built Resilience with Pure Storage and Veeam

There’s nothing fun about dealing with an unplanned outage. But if you’re looking for a silver lining and you happen to be an independent school district, then a Friday during the summer break is the best-case scenario. 

When a third-party software update created widespread global outages, I thanked my lucky stars: School was out, so there was minimal impact to students, teachers, and staff at Spring Branch Independent School District (ISD) in Houston. But what happened next was the result of preparation and planning.

One of my team’s many responsibilities is to back up all of Spring Branch ISD’s critical workloads to Pure Storage. These include ERP, student information, and phone systems, as well as SQL servers and various education-specific applications—and data from 50,000 users and 100,000 devices. The outage impacted many of the district’s Hyper-V virtual machines, which we were unable to restore using the software vendor’s recovery instructions. 

So, we turned to the previous night’s Veeam backups on Pure Storage to restore operations quickly. The strong partnership and integration between Pure Storage and Veeam was a key factor in our ability to recover in just a weekend when other organizations were down for days. It was also a good opportunity for us to practice and hone our cyber resiliency plan for future incidents that could occur during the school year, when longer downtime is problematic.

We had several key takeaways and lessons learned to mitigate risks, secure data, and enable always-on data protection for uninterrupted operations. 

1. Quality Backups Are Key to Recovery 

Too often, backups are overlooked or considered secondary until it’s too late. Coupled with alert fatigue—54%¹ of alerts go uninvestigated by security teams on any given day—it becomes abundantly clear why backups are a lifeline to recovery. Without them, what might be a minor setback can quickly spiral into a full-blown crisis.

Spring Branch ISD uses Pure Storage® FlashBlade® as the primary backup repository for Veeam backups. These backups are then copied to Pure Storage FlashArray//C™, which is located at the district’s disaster recovery site. Backups are secured with immutable and indelible SafeMode™ Snapshots from Pure Storage. In addition to enabling rapid restore, FlashBlade and Veeam protect the locked versions of objects in accordance with regulatory and privacy requirements for personally identifiable information (PII).

The integrated Pure Storage and Veeam solutions restored large amounts of data—80 terabytes—quickly and efficiently, highlighting the improved performance over our previous backup storage solution. 

According to my colleague Ben Allen, Lead Systems Engineer, Cybersecurity and Operations: “I would stake my career and reputation on Pure Storage with Veeam. Together they exceeded our expectations on every front: performance, resiliency, and simplicity.” 

2. Cross-collaboration and Training Are Critical

Outages don’t just impact one department—they affect the entire organization. From IT teams to customer service, everyone has a role in managing the fallout. This outage was a perfect example of why cross-collaboration is not a nice-to-have, but a must-have. 

To achieve this, I work to foster collaboration between the infrastructure and cybersecurity teams—both of which I lead. I also prioritize system and application ownership and training for staff handling PII data as part of a broader incident response plan. Unauthorized access to PII can have serious consequences for the person whose information was compromised, as well as for our organization. Built-in cybersecurity from Pure Storage helps us comply with legal requirements for protecting PII.

Creating an environment for staff learning is also key to a quick response. For example, Allen was two hours away when the outage hit Spring Branch ISD. Although he is the primary lead for storage backups, the team was able to step in without hesitation because everyone on the IT team can use Pure Storage and Veeam. Cross-training ensures that no one person is solely responsible for critical tasks, and there is no single point of failure from a human perspective.

As a result, my teams were able to communicate seamlessly during the incident, share resources, and make fast decisions together to bring systems back online.  

3. Human Error Will Always Be a Factor 

Despite all the technology, systems, and processes in place, the human factor remains a significant concern. This is particularly true of staff who may inadvertently compromise security via phishing emails or reused passwords. The district employs identity management tools and strict processes to mitigate these risks, but the human element remains our biggest challenge.

This is where SafeMode from Pure Storage really shines. It mitigates risk and secures data from cyber threats including human error and is foundational to our backup and recovery strategy.

Creating a culture that anticipates mistakes and plans for them can make all the difference in turning a major error into a minor setback. In the end, people make mistakes, but organizations that plan for them recover faster and stronger.

From One Misfortune to the Next, and Back to Business as Usual

An unplanned outage may feel like the end of the world, but it doesn’t have to be. By focusing on quality backups, encouraging cross-collaboration, and preparing for human error, organizations like ours can turn a potential disaster into a valuable learning experience. It’s not just about fixing the issue at hand—it’s about building systems and cultures that are strong enough to bounce back, no matter what comes next.

For us, what came next was Hurricane Beryl. Fortunately, we were able to weather the storm based on the lessons we learned from the outage. If this happened today, we’re confident that we could restore 80 terabytes of data within just a few hours.  

In addition to the time savings and reliability of the Pure Storage platform, when it comes to business as usual, our team no longer spends time troubleshooting storage issues like we did with our previous provider. The set-it-and-forget-it nature of Pure Storage allows us to focus on other tasks, and excellent support from Pure’s team has further enhanced our experience. What’s more, thanks to the Evergreen® subscription model, we anticipate cost savings of up to 30% compared to the district’s previous storage vendor. 

Pure Storage gives us the best of all worlds—a cost-effective, resilient architecture that enables us to recover quickly if needed while greatly simplifying our operations. We have peace of mind knowing that we can deliver a secure and continuous learning environment where our students can excel.

 ¹451 Research: Voice of the Enterprise: Security Analytics & SecOps 2023