Morgan County, formed in 1889, is served from its county seat of Fort Morgan, Colorado, a town with a population of 11,034. Even a peaceful community has its share of IT problems: although not usually in tornado territory, a tornado came close enough to expose the County's need for a remote disaster recovery and archiving system.

The County was saddled with an old technology tape storage system and had no offsite disaster recovery solution. Karol Kopetzky, Information Systems manager for Morgan County Government, and her IT staff decided to go out to bid to remedy the situation. While it first appeared there was a wealth of solutions to consider, the responses were sidestepping some of the requirements, specifically 7-year retention.

The pressure on the small team was real. Kopetzky and only three other IT professionals are responsible for all the County departments and must service eight separate facilities located throughout Fort Morgan. Restoring a server from the tape library took two days, and the County's objective was to provide onsite and offsite storage and disaster recovery for the legally required 7-year timeframe on its SQL server.

Morgan County engaged CyberFortress Partner RDBU (Remote Data Backups) to provide cloud-based managed services as well as onsite storage. The County selected the CyberFortress solution due to its 7-year retention archiving ability and its low cost per gigabyte of storage pricing, billed per month of cloud backup.

The deployment pairs a Managed Service Provider with CyberFortress storage to deliver the required onsite and offsite disaster recovery. Hardware includes the CyberFortress TurboRestore Appliance, supporting the County's SQL and Windows Server 2008 R2 environment, with the partner managed service providing offsite mirrored disaster recovery.

CyberFortress cloud storage provides 7 years of retention and up to 195 versions, and the County receives 24/7 support from RDBU. With the new CyberFortress storage solution, restoring a server takes under two hours, whereas restoring from the tape library previously took two days.

• Server restores cut from two days on tape to under two hours
• Cloud storage provides the legally required 7 years of retention
• Up to 195 versions retained, letting IT quickly restore overwritten files
• No need to maintain decommissioned servers to restore old data
• Total cost of ownership dramatically lower than other vendors
• Partner managed service delivers offsite mirrored disaster recovery with 24/7 RDBU support