St. Johns County Sheriff's Office boosts data protection

The Challenge

SJSO’s IT team manages all of the applications and services used by the region’s 275,000 residents and over 900 employees, including the local 911 emergency dispatch center and the county jail. “If any of our systems go down, a lot of critical work comes to a halt,” said Jake Parham, St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office’s IT Manager. “Our police force and patrol users have the ability to function in an offline mode, but a lot of our major business applications are not usable if our systems are unavailable.”

The Sheriff’s Office had been relying on an on-prem Quest Rapid Recovery backup solution for many years. “Our old data protection software performed adequately at first as far as backups were concerned,” explained Parham. “We could retrieve and restore data fairly easily, but we were outgrowing that system since it was based on legacy technology.”

When it came time for a refresh, Parham checked references with several other Cohesity users, and all of them highly recommended the Cohesity solution. “After hearing all of the great feedback from existing Cohesity customers, I watched a couple of demos on the Cohesity website and completed several labs online. I quickly discovered that Cohesity was an extremely robust and user-friendly platform. I knew it would be a great fit for our organization’s data protection needs for a modern next-gen solution going forward.”

The Solution

SJSO upgraded the data protection environment in 2020, choosing to go with a hybrid operational model using both an on-prem deployment as well as Cohesity’s DataProtect delivered as a service offering hosted on AWS. “Cohesity enables us to protect our valuable user data without having to purchase a lot of extra storage infrastructure upfront. Since we didn’t need to procure any hardware, we were up and running on the Cohesity offering within an hour,” said Parham.

The Cohesity on-prem solution is being used to protect the Sheriff Office’s file servers, SQL database servers, domain controllers, application servers, and web servers, and the Cohesity solution protects all Microsoft 365 data in the cloud.

“We decided to go with Cohesity’s offering so we wouldn’t have to purchase a lot of extra storage infrastructure upfront,” said Parham. “With over 900 M365 users, the amount of storage needed would have put a huge crunch on my IT budget. I’d rather pay for the Cohesity hosted service than spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on new storage systems. We also liked the flexibility of Cohesity’s pricing models. We chose the per user licensing to fit our requirements.”

The Results

“Our previous backup solution required a lot more hand-holding and maintenance,” noted Parham. “I was spending at least 15 hours per month just protecting our data. With Cohesity, it now only takes me two to three hours per month.”

Parham also speaks highly of Helios, Cohesity’s next-gen data management platform and management UI that provides a comprehensive range of data services that allows him to manage both his on-prem deployment and BaaS through a single pane of glass. “The Helios dashboard is awesome,” he said. “I log into the management interface every couple of days, just to check it out and see if everything is working well. I do get automatic alerts from Helios, but it’s still helpful to look in there and see how well everything is doing across our entire hybrid cloud environment.”

“Our IT team loves Cohesity’s global search capability,” said Parham. “You just type in a file name, and it immediately locates the backup for you. You can restore any VM and have it online quickly, even though it hasn’t finished the restore process. The few times we’ve had to restore a file or folder that’s gone missing, the solution has been extremely fast and easy. It used to take 30 minutes to restore a file, but with Cohesity, it takes less than five minutes.”

“With Cohesity, our backups are ‘write once, read many’ copies,” said Parham. “We have increased data security since our backups can’t be changed. Right now, our backups are spread across multiple arrays, but I am looking to add another array in an off-site location.”