Edgartown was founded in 1642, built by whaling captains and serving as a seaport village throughout the 1800s, and is the largest town in Dukes County, Massachusetts. It is an attractive tourist spot and served as the primary filming location for Steven Spielberg’s film Jaws, in 1975.
The town is a part of Massachusetts’ ninth congressional district. And represented by the Massachusetts Senate as a portion of the Cap and Islands District. Local governance is led by a Board of Selectmen.
Challenge
Edgartown’s IT Department is responsible for all government hardware, networking, phone systems, the town website, and data pertaining to the government and its residents. With over 1.5 terabytes of data, Edgartown’s IT department needed to find an efficient backup solution and develop a disaster recovery strategy. The town’s backups were not immune to any local natural disasters. In case of such an event, the town’s employee and citizen data would be compromised.
According to Adam Darack, the IT Manager of Edgartown, the team needed “a product that could run directly from a NAS [Network Attached Storage],” as there are multiple being run in Edgartown’s IT environment. Backups were performed by backing up a mapped drive from a computer or server. In some instances, the computers would have issues and the Network Attached Storage would not be actively backed up.
Cost savings were another issue that Edgartown faced. With a tight budget, the team needed to realize an immediate reduction in costs to justify new backup and recovery infrastructure.
“I needed something that could back up a NAS. I use them in my environment and it was a challenge to find a product that could run directly from the NAS, not on a computer that would back up a connected NAS,” – Adam Darack, IT Manager of Edgartown
Solution: MSP360 and Amazon S3 for Secure and Cost-Effective Backup and Recovery
Why AWS?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides cloud computing resources, networking facilities, and multi-user applications that can reduce the amount of financial and business resources spent on IT infrastructure. Further, the AWS Cloud provides multiple options for the backup of data, which Edgartown could use to customize its backup and recovery strategy. For the town’s archive data, Amazon Glacier provides low-cost, long-term archive storage.
“I wanted to be able to utilize Amazon's storage costs with a good backup program. We were looking at backing up substantially more data and I needed to effectively manage my costs associated with this increased data, as municipal budgets can be tight and spoken for”
– Adam Darack, IT Manager of Edgartown
Why MSP360 Backup?
MSP360 Backup integrates with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and can be installed directly on NASs to back up data to AWS. This enables organizations to ensure that local and cloud storage lifecycle policies are correctly configured. Moreover, MSP360 Backup can circumnavigate Amazon S3 and store files directly to Amazon Glacier, resulting in reduced expenses.
“MSP360 is simple to use. Installation is easy and online management is straightforward. The storage is inexpensive thanks to Amazon S3, and MSP360's support has proven to be quick to respond” – Adam Darack, IT Manager of Edgartown
Results: Edgartown’s Data Is Safe, Secure, and On Budget
Edgartown’s IT department successfully backed up over 1.5 terabytes of data from its on-premises storage, freeing up additional storage space and lowering overhead costs. Previously, Edgartown had been spending approximately $1,700 per year on backup and recovery
services. The move to MSP360 Backup and AWS cut costs by $800 per year.
MSP360 and AWS’s joint solution provides the Edgartown IT team with centralized monitoring and management of its backups, inexpensive backup and archive storage, and dedicated support. It further strengthened the backup process by running directly on the team’s NASs as an application, instead of backing up a mapped drive from a computer or server.
“With MSP360 and Amazon S3, I have a product that works on everything quite brilliantly, and a single product I can use on all of my devices” – Adam Darack, IT Manager of Edgartown
