Intelligent CIO North America Issue 21 | Page 59

CASE STUDY
Do the natural threats you have to deal with every day of the year place an even greater emphasis on data protection ?
That makes it significantly more important because when you think about the whole premise and concepts behind Disaster Recovery , you want to have some geographical distance between data centers .
And in this case , when you ’ re dealing with the landmass at 8,200 square miles or so that Kern County encompasses , which for the most part is agricultural and rural , you don ’ t really have a whole lot of state-ofthe-art data center facilities available .
So those are all considerations that we have to factor in when it comes to what we ’ re investing in and how we ’ re investing in next generation data products .
How does Veeam support your ransomware protection strategy ?
Although Veeam is my standard for data protection , at the end of the day it is my last line of defense .
Did you achieve your goal of consolidating data protection into one unified environment ?
People will often say you ’ re only as good as your last backup and so this is no different . I can ’ t think of a scenario where if I didn ’ t have the backups for my business-critical systems , whether they were onprem or cloud , how I would be able to face the board of supervisors , my constituents , my public , and let them know that we were just so irresponsible with the public trust .
That ’ s the key about government and being in Govtech . The rush around Govtech is that your mission is to serve a population of almost a million residents and as a county organization you ’ re providing mission critical services for them .
And so we have to start looking at backup not as a chore , but more importantly as a strategic part of our overall planning process for where we invest , how we invest and why we invest .
Cybersecurity , the whole concept around hacking and everything else , all that does is accelerate the need for us to make better informed decisions .
And so from my perspective , having this long standing relationship with Veeam , trusting in them that they ’ re able to use that product to support all of our different businesses across different use cases , just makes it part of my overall strategy around simplification and standardization . We don ’ t need to reinvent the wheel here – multiple points of entry , multiple points of failure – let ’ s simplify as much as we can .
Yes . What ’ s interesting about government technology in general is that you have different agencies and you have different kinds of governance for technology across each of those agencies .
And so what we tried to do here at Kern from the very get go was recognize that we had some variability in how we approached IT spend , how we approach IT sourcing and how we approach IT standardization .
This is really part of the overall effort , of our playbook , around how we standardize and what we ’ ve done now is when you look at the 40 or so different departments across Kern County , I ’ d say about 95 – 96 % of them are already on Veeam . But we have a roadmap to get the other departments on-boarded on to Veeam once their legacy licences expire , and so that ’ s really part of the appeal .
From an economic point of view , it makes more sense from buying power , from leverage , to be able to come to the table with a use case of 8,500 employees across 1,000 servers all using one homogenized product as opposed to varying types of solutions .
So there ’ s obviously an economic benefit there and then from an overall administration point of view , I ’ m not having to reskill and train different staff members for different products . They ’ re all using the same product so across the board there ’ s a lot of value in being able to approach things simplistically , which is what we ’ re doing here at Kern . p
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