Reducing Backup and Recovery Costs by 80%

The Eighteenth Judicial Circuit of Florida Prepares for Unforseen Natural Disasters with Iron Mountain Unified Information Management Solutions

CHALLENGE: The Office of the State Attorney, Eighteenth Judicial Circuit of Florida, must reduce backup and archiving costs and downtime in anticipation of natural disasters, including regional hurricanes.

SOLUTION: The Iron Mountain data protection and archiving solution delivers lower-cost backup, recovery and automated archiving for true data protection throughout the information lifecycle.

RESULTS: The Eighteenth Judicial Circuit reduced data protection costs by 80 percent while minimizing the time and resources required for data archiving assurance.

the office of the STATE ATTORNEY, EIGHTEENTH JUDICIAL CIRCUIT, KEEPS FLORIDA SAFE

Keeping two of the most populated counties of Florida safe is the critical work performed by the Eighteenth Judicial Circuit and its current State Attorney, Norman R. Wolfinger. The State Attorney works to protect the innocent, to prosecute crimes, and to promote the safety and well-being of the public, while seeking out justice.

The Eighteenth Judicial Circuit was created by the Florida state legislature in 1967 and is composed of Brevard and Seminole Counties. The population of the Circuit has grown substantially since 1972 due to the influence of the space program on Brevard County and the effects Disney World has had on Seminole County. The State Attorney's Office has three main prosecution divisions — felony, misdemeanor, and juvenile — with specialized units and programs that support the functions of these divisions. Today, the Circuit Court is the state trial court of general jurisdiction. It has jurisdiction to try criminal cases, which are classified as felonies, including capital cases.

With a large geographical area comprised of over 80 miles between the main courthouse in Viera (Melbourne) and the Criminal Justice Center in Sanford, the Eighteenth Judicial Circuit operates a total of five offices. For these multiple locations, data protection and retention is critical, especially because of the risk of hurricanes and other natural disasters common in the Florida region. Even more vital is consistent access to a unified solution that can reduce records management costs while reducing backup and recovery time for critical court documents used daily by each location.

"When we have a hurricane or tropical storm warning, we begin to prepare for the event by backing up our data in advance. We needed a much better solution that wouldn’t drain our resources." — Norman R. Wolfinger, State Attorney, eighteenth Judicial Circuit of florida

THE CHALLENGE

In 2004, Florida experienced one of the worst hurricane seasons ever recorded. After witnessing firsthand the devastation a hurricane can cause, State Attorney Wolfinger identified that a complete disaster recovery solution must be a top priority. He wanted to move critical records and data to a secondary site, out of state, and away from future risk of natural disasters.

"When we had a hurricane or tropical storm warning, we would begin to prepare for the event by backing up our data in advance," said Wolfinger. "This could take up to two days and could impact our business operations for the district, resulting in lost productivity plus the cost of IT resources, to get everything ready for a catastrophic event. We needed a much better solution that wouldn’t drain our resources while giving us the reliability and availability we require."

Equally important to disaster preparedness for the judicial agency was the reliable access to critical information during everyday situations. With its previous tape backup solution, restoring from a server outage could take days while IT staff crawled through countless backup tapes to restore the necessary files. An online data protection solution was needed to eliminate downtime and assure disaster preparedness, regardless of the cause of the outage.

THE SOLUTION

The Office of the State Attorney, Eighteenth Judicial Circuit, looked at four separate companies to identify the best solution. Critical to their choice was ease of use, lower maintenance costs, and rapid recovery. Ultimately, the State Attorney selected a unified information management solution from Iron Mountain which combines both backup/recovery and archiving in a single, reliable solution. It also seamlessly integrates with a comprehensive archiving solution for images and high-capacity audio files.

"We already had Iron Mountain in place to store physical tapes offsite," said Sandra Wolf, IT director, Office of the State Attorney, Eighteenth Judicial Circuit. "As our data volumes expanded, our backup and restore windows were growing to unacceptable limits. That’s when we heard about LiveVault®, a fully managed cloud-based solution from Iron Mountain. Their hardened facilities, underground bunker, and redundancy between the two sites made selecting LiveVault a no-brainer. And with the ease of use and cost savings we’ve seen, we know we made the right choice."

Their choice was further validated during the simple installation process. The State Attorney's Office, Eighteenth Judicial Circuit, has commended Iron Mountain for its easy deployment — both for its LiveVault solution for document backup and its Virtual File Store™ solution for the archiving and compliant protection of images and digital audio media.

"No professional services were required, and the installation steps were intuitive and transparent," said Wolf. "We just installed a small program on our server to set up the backup. The whole thing took only about two minutes. It's one of the easiest things I’ve ever implemented. Totally painless."

"Their hardened facilities, underground bunker, and redundancy between the two sites made selecting LiveVault® a no-brainer. And with the ease of use and cost savings we’ve seen, we know we made the right choice." — Sandra Wolf , IT Direc tor, Office of the State Attorney , Eightee nth Judicial Circuit

"It's one of the easiest things I’ve ever implemented. Totally painless."

THE RESULTS

As a result of choosing LiveVault, the State Attorney’s Office, Eighteenth Judicial Circuit, has eliminated tape backup, and its backup and restore windows have gone from days to just minutes. In addition, the organization now has granular backup, instead of crawling through countless tapes to find the data they need. Furthermore, its recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) have improved dramatically because they now have business policies for automated backup and no longer need to search through countless tapes for “shotgun” recoveries.

"With the Iron Mountain unified information management solution, we now have a true disaster recovery solution in place," said State Attorney Wolfinger. "This gives us an 80 percent overall cost savings over our previous solution. Plus, it enables us to maintain end-user productivity when a storm is coming. Now we don't need to shut down just to assure that we can withstand a storm."

The organization is also benefiting from its seamless archiving solution with the Iron Mountain Virtual File Store solution for its critical image records. Now scanned documents, photos for criminal cases, and audio digital evidence files are protected and archived with complete peace of mind. Just as LiveVault has enabled seamless protection for document files, Virtual File Store assures retention of image and audio media stored with ease for up to 50 years to assure compliance and easy access.

About Iron Mountai n. Iron Mountain Incorporated (NYSE: IRM) provides information management services that help organizations lower the costs, risks and inefficiencies of managing their physical and digital data. Founded in 1951, Iron Mountain manages billions of information assets, including backup and archival data, electronic records, document imaging, business records, secure shredding, and more, for organizations around the world. Visit the company Web site at www.ironmountain.com for more information.