Burgas Municipality Cuts Recovery Times by 50% and Advances NIS2 Compliance

Introduction

Burgas Municipality is the local government authority for the city of Burgas, Bulgaria, and its surrounding region. Serving a population of more than 232,000, it employs over 430 people and processes more than 150,000 citizen requests a year.

Facing rapidly growing data volumes, the rising risk of ransomware attacks, and a need to align with the EU’s NIS2 directive, the administration needed faster, more secure backup storage. The promise of Absolute Immutability, seamless Veeam integration, and simplified management led it to work with Object First.

Challenges

• Performance bottlenecks: An ageing tape library and a repurposed disk partition could not keep pace with rapidly growing data volumes, slowing backups and degrading wider storage performance.
• Insufficient data protection: Neither approach offered a high enough level of security and resilience for an organisation entrusted with large volumes of sensitive citizen data.
• Rising compliance and ransomware pressure: The Municipality needed stronger technical, operational, and organisational measures to manage cybersecurity risks to comply with NIS2 regulation and strengthen ransomware resilience.

Solution

Balancing strict security requirements against a defined annual budget, Burgas Municipality evaluated options with its technology providers and chose Object First for its Absolute Immutability and native Veeam integration. Support from their trusted IT partner and Object First enabled installation, configuration, and commissioning in a single day.

Results

• Recovery times cut ~50%: Critical-system recovery fell from around four hours to about two, with improved reliability and near-zero errors.
• Absolute Immutability: Backups cannot be altered or deleted—even by an administrator—with alerts on tampering and two-factor authentication on the admin panel.
• Dependable performance: Sustained 2.4–2.8 GB/s throughput keeps backups within maintenance windows and public services uninterrupted.
• Stronger NIS2 compliance: An immutable, offline copy completes the 3-2-1-1-0 backup rule and supports several Article 21 risk-management measures.