Citynet, part of HALLAG Kommunal GmbH. is committed to helping customers recover quickly and minimize downtime in the face of cybersecurity challenges like ransomware. Based in the picturesque town of Hall in Austria’s Tirol, HALLAG provides a range of services—from internet to municipal pools—while Citynet focuses on delivering broadband and IT solutions for local businesses. The company’s goal: to ensure customers can be back online in hours, not days, after a disruption.
Recently, Citynet saw a gap in the market to expand its disaster recovery capabilities beyond municipal departments and deliver a new service to help local businesses quickly deploy a temporary IT environment following ransomware attacks or other disruptions. This service helps minimize downtime and reduces potential financial impact.
To bring this rapid disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) solution to life, Citynet turned to a trusted partner. With more than 20 years of collaboration, Lenovo was the natural choice to support Citynet in helping customers recover and resume operations more quickly. Citynet leveraged the Lenovo 360 for TruScale framework to deliver a turnkey disaster recovery-as-a-service solution—enabling customers to rapidly deploy a temporary IT environment and restore services with minimal disruption.
Christian Vojak, Supervisor DevOps / Senior Server Architect & Engineer at HALLAG Kommunal GmbH said, “As we provide essential municipal services, we have robust disaster protection capabilities in place to reduce the threat of security incidents to our systems and services. Our goal was to extend that same level of disaster protection to businesses across the region.”
“Our long-standing partnership with HALLAG Kommunal GmbH enabled close collaboration on a solution that meets the needs of both the organization and its customers,” says Abdul Hakim, Executive Director, Digital Workplace Solutions at Lenovo. “The flexibility of Lenovo TruScale Device-as-a-Service was instrumental in delivering a rapid, cost-effective approach to disaster recovery—helping businesses respond more quickly to ransomware and other IT disruptions.”
Linda Yao, VP, Hybrid Cloud & AI Solutions, Lenovo, adds: “Lenovo TruScale Infrastructure-as-a-Service empowers organizations like Citynet to deliver scalable, secure solutions without the complexity of traditional infrastructure management. By offering a flexible, pay-as-you-go model, TruScale enables companies to respond quickly to customer needs, reduce operational risk, and accelerate innovation—whether it’s for disaster recovery, infrastructure migration, or ongoing digital transformation.”
Recovering faster
Citynet already offered a wide range of IT services to local businesses, including a colocation data center in Hall. The company also had a strong track record of successful collaboration with Lenovo on IT projects supporting local public sector organizations and business customers. Familiar with Lenovo’s solutions, Citynet was able to maintain reliable, high-quality services for the residents of Hall and business customers across the area. When the opportunity arose to develop a cost-effective, efficient disaster recovery-as-a-service offering, Citynet turned to Lenovo.
It quickly became clear that Lenovo TruScale, with its pay-as-you-go-model and built in support, would provide the flexibility and responsiveness Citynet needed to power a disaster recovery as-a-service solution. With Lenovo TruScale Device as a Service (DaaS) and TruScale Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Citynet realized that it could deliver turnkey disaster recovery solution for local businesses impacted by cyber incidents.
In Austria, businesses face added complexity when it comes to ransomware: by law, they must not only report ransomware incidents to the authorities but also isolate the affected systems for investigation. With stricter cybersecurity requirements, such as the EU’s Network and Information Security Directive (NIS2) recently coming into force, Citynet recognized that many businesses would need to strengthen their disaster recovery strategies to stay compliant.
Christian Vojak explained: “Lenovo TruScale’s flexible pay-as-you-go pricing and agile deployment options made it a perfect fit for our new disaster recovery-as-a-service solution. With built-in maintenance and remote support, it gives us the confidence to offer customers a reliable option during critical situations. The fact that we can also leverage the solution internally, if needed, gives our operations team valuable peace of mind.”
Out of the box solution
The one-box solution offers an environment that can be up and running as soon as the server rack arrives with no complex setup required. Additional services can be added over time as needed. Citynet can deploy the solution quickly, while experts from both Citynet and Lenovo can monitor the setup remotely to ensure reliable and efficient operation.
To help businesses resume operations as quickly as possible, the data center is powered by a hyperconverged infrastructure based on Lenovo ThinkAgile VX nodes with VMware virtualization, bringing together storage, compute and networking in a single streamlined system. To support end users, Citynet also deploys Lenovo ThinkPad notebooks to help employees get back to work even if their original devices were compromised by ransomware. Lenovo XClarity software also means that Citynet can manage the environment remotely, with the ThinkAgile nodes able to support a wide range of business-critical workloads.
Vojak said, “In the past, setting up a clean environment in a disaster recovery scenario could take up to three days. Our new solution offers innovative security, and reliability features such as physical access control, airflow monitoring, humidity sensors, and integrated mobile connectivity. With Lenovo TruScale, the core IT platform is available immediately, allowing us to help customers restore full operations much more quickly.”
Cutting risks
For local businesses, Citynet’s innovative disaster recovery service brought greater peace of mind and reduced business risk in the face of cyber threats. Citynet’s clients could rely on a rapid, fully compliant recovery process aligned with local regulations and EU requirements, minimizing downtime and avoiding extended outages due to ransomware attacks.
For Citynet, the ability to offer rapid, secure disaster recovery also opens a growing business opportunity. As new regulations such as NIS2 come into effect, more businesses are recognizing the importance of strengthening their disaster preparedness.
Vojak concluded, “With Lenovo TruScale, we now offer disaster recovery capabilities as a cost-effective subscription service, with Lenovo managing the core system maintenance. It’s a complete data center in a compact rack—flexible enough that our customers can also use it for other scenarios, such as to support complex infrastructure migrations.”
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