King County: Secure, Taxpayer-Friendly Data Protection in the Cloud

For King County, a major hub of business and culture in Washington state, protecting data growing by 50% a year with on-premises purpose-built appliances (PBBAs) and tape had become challenging and expensive. The county had the option of investing in a $1.1 million infrastructure refresh or transitioning to a considerably more affordable and agile cloud-based backup solution. After investigating and comparing other cloud-based backup offerings, NetApp AltaVault cloud‐integrated storage appliances were selected as the top choice. Not only were they 70% less expensive to deploy than upgrading existing equipment, but they also supported seamless integration with AWS and the backup software the IT team was already using. With support from NetApp partner Ednetics, two AltaVault AVA400 appliances were up and running within hours. These appliances, in conjunction with Veeam software, now enable the IT team to back up most of the county’s data infrastructure, including 700 VMware virtual machines. And with inline deduplication and compression, AltaVault appliances speed data transfer to the cloud while reducing the amount of data the county sends there by a ratio of 12 to 1. Data is also protected in flight and at rest using AES 256-bit encryption and TLS, so everything from criminal to health records remains secure.