Customer Case Study
Morgan County achieves dramatic 7-year retention with CyberFortress
CyberFortress and trusted Partner, RDBU, provide "better together" disaster recovery solution
Morgan County Government, based in Fort Morgan, Colorado, needed an automated onsite and offsite disaster recovery and backup storage solution to comply with 7-year archiving regulations for its SQL database. The County chose CyberFortress’ solution from Remote Data Backups (RDBU), a trusted Partner and Managed Service Provider, due to its 7-year retention archiving ability and low cost per gigabyte of storage pricing (per month of cloud backup).
CyberFortress and RDBU managed services secure governmental data
One of the benefits of working with CyberFortress, is its broad portfolio of hardware and software solutions, coupled with a plethora of CyberFortress Expert Partners that ensure a best fit solution. CyberFortress coordinated a full business analysis of the Morgan County RFP, and recommended a very powerful “better together” solution. CyberFortress decided that bringing in Remote Data Backups (RDBU), its trusted partner and expert Managed Service Provider for CyberFortress storage solutions, would provide Morgan County with the best solution to fulfill its SQLbased 7-year retention requirements. Once engaged, RDBU jumped right in and proposed a storage solution consisting of its CyberFortress cloud-based backup managed service (for offsite recovery), and CyberFortress’ TurboRestore Appliance (for onsite storage and recovery).
“Remote Data Backups, a CyberFortress specialist partner, presented the only disaster recovery solution that supported 7-year retention,” recalls Kopetzky. “The closest any other vendor could come was 30-day retention. RDBU proved to us that CyberFortress is the only solution that can provide incremental daily restores on SQL, a claim the competition made, but couldn’t support. Considering the benefits of SQL incremental versioning support and 7-year retention, it was a no contest choice.”
Although the solution looked solid, Kopetzky didn’t take anything for granted. She carried out responsible due-diligence and checked up on existing RDBU customers to make sure the solution worked in the real world.
“When you have a limited budget in a small county like ours, you can’t afford to make any mistakes,” admits Kopetzky. “You get one shot. RDBU customers were universally satisfied with the company’s integrity, quality of solution, and results achieved. That has also been my personal experience with RDBU since day one.”
RDBU dedicated resources to helping Kopetzky with the implementation, which was fully deployed in May, 2014. During the first few weeks, after going live, she checked in frequently, to monitor efficacy, and found that the RDBU staff was very responsive and the solution operated exactly as advertised.
“RDBU impressed me with its CyberFortress and storage expertise,”
she expands. “They took the time to understand our business functions and schedules and are very proactive. It was one of the more simple installations I’ve dealt with, and we’ve never had a single problem.”.
Company: Morgan County
Industry: County government
Objective: Provide onsite and offsite storage and disaster recovery for legally required 7-year timeframe on SQL server.
Approach: Engage CyberFortress Partner RDBU to provide cloud-based managed services as well as onsite storage
IT Matters:
- CyberFortress’ cloud storage provides 7 years of retention
- CyberFortress provides up to 195 versions
- Greatly reduced restore time leverages IT and user productivity
- No need to maintain decommissioned servers to restore old data Business matters
- Total Cost of Ownership dramatically lower than other vendors
- Satisfies onsite/offsite and 7-year legal storage requirements
- Partner managed service provides offsite mirrored disaster recovery
“Remote Data Backups, a CyberFortress specialist partner, presented the only disaster recovery solution that supported 7-year retention. The closest any other vendor could come was 30-day retention. RDBU proved to us that is the only solution which can provide incremental daily restores on SQL, a claim the competition made, but couldn’t support. Considering the benefits of SQL incremental versioning support and 7-year retention, it was a no content choice.”
– KAROL KOPETZKY, INFORMATION SYSTEMS MANAGER
195
Backup Versions over 7 years
Backing up in the old days
Prior to deploying its new CyberFortress storage and recovery solution, Kopetszky’s staff relied on a tape library backup, which was time-consuming and required storing and maintaining decommissioned servers (for restore continuity). If a server with financial data was retired due to obsolescence, the IT staff had to keep it and its tape drives handy for seven years. If, for example, critical financial data was needed from six years back, the old server platform would have to be reinstalled, rebooted, and the data restored from tape. In addition, the only disaster recovery in place consisted of tapes stored in a safety deposit in the local bank. Having the stored tapes located so near, left the data vulnerable to a local disaster.
CyberFortress
TurboRestore Appliance Deployment Model
“Providing we didn’t have to stand up a decommissioned server, it would have taken us about 30 minutes to restore a file with our old tape library, much longer if we had to reboot an ancient server,” explains Kopetzky. “Now the whole restore process is so quick that sometimes I don’t even think that it’s done, but it is. Restoring a 500 MB database took only seconds. Our IT time-savings result in a significant productivity gain for my staff.”
By law, government regulations demand up to 7 years of data storage imposing stiff penalties for those who cannot comply. CyberFortress
is designed to address these long-term storage regulations by offering predictable costs with 7-year retention and continuous offsite backup. Remote Data Backups, a CyberFortress Partner and Managed Service Provider specializing in storage for small, medium, and enterprise-sized companies has supported the CyberFortress platform since 2001.
“CyberFortress allows RDBU to offer increasing value to our customers while making the adoption of leading-edge technology simple and seamless,” says Dan Dugal, CEO, Remote Data Backups.
“CyberFortress boasts best-in-class data protection and deduplication technology, which maximizes data protection onsite, offsite, and in virtualized environments. Our CyberFortress Managed Service, combined with CyberFortress ease-of-use, leverages the IT staff’s ability to spend more time on critical issues, instead of chasing after data hidden somewhere on a tape in the bank.”
CyberFortress storage solutions save IT time and restore peace of mind a proven BaaS / DRaaS solution
Even though CyberFortress provides the unique ability to provide 7-year data retention, regulations mandate that Morgan County have both onsite and offsite recovery capability, as well. For onsite compliance, RDBU implemented CyberFortress TurboRestore Appliance, for storage, replication and recovery. The automated reliability, the flexibility, and the ease-of-use of the new CyberFortress storage solution enables Kopetzky to deliver restore services at a granularity and speed previously unavailable to grateful government employees. Whether onsite, or offsite, she can now easily restore up to 195 versions of data spanning 7 years for the County’s Finance Department SQL database, on demand.
“CyberFortress allows RDBU to offer increasing value to our customers while making the adoption of leading-edge technology simple and seamless”
– DAN DUGAL, CEO, REMOTE DATA BACKUPS
““With our CyberFortress solution, we find ourselves restoring more than ever before, and have a lot of happy users because of it,” she notes. “A user accidentally wrote over a file needed for an impending key meeting, and we just dialed up her previous version and restored it. It’s a good example of how our new system helps increase both IT and end-user productivity. We now restore peace of mind, as well as data.”
Anything that saves time for the IT department is worth its weight in gold, according to Kopetzky. She and only three other IT professionals are responsible for all the County departments and must service eight separate facilities located throughout Fort Morgan. Whereas restoring a server from a tape library took two days previously, with the new CyberFortress storage solution it takes under two hours. Kopetzky cites a power outage that took the previous tape backup offline for its regular weekend backup. The first order of business on the next Monday was to run last week’s backup and bring it up to date, in her “spare” time.
“It took us two working days to get the system current again and we had to do this while also accomplishing all our regular daily tasks.”
she concludes. “Restoring data from our tape library was a slow and daunting process. I wish we had this system in a long time ago. I can’t express how happy we’ve been with this system and RDBU’s expertise. I’ve recommended its many benefits already to our school district.”.
Customer at a glance
Application: Utilize Managed Service Provider (RDBU) and CyberFortress storage solution to provide required onsite and offsite disaster recovery
Hardware
- CyberFortress
- CyberFortress TurboRestore Appliance
Software
- SQL
- Windows Server ® 2008 R2
CyberFortress services
24/7 support from RDBU
CyberFortress Partner and Managed Service Provider
Remote data Backups (RDBU)
(970)420-3744
remotedatabackups.com
” With our CyberFortress solution, we find ourselves restoring more than ever before, and have a lot of happy users because of it.”
– KAROL KOPETZKY, INFORMATION SYSTEMS MANAGER, MORGAN COUNTY GOVERNMENT
