Profile:
The data housed in each county office is critical and must be available, but each office operates a poorly funded effort to satisfy their IT needs, making due with aging systems and poorly performing networks. Unfortunately, each individual department budget is too small for any relevant improvement.

Executive Summary:
Each of six departments currently maintains an aging server, an inadequate DSL connection and an assortment of workstations, laptops, and printers. Every department could experience increased performance and reliability if they could combine their funds to share in the IT investment. Instead of surprise disaster response, a predictable cost model will be critical to satisfy the stringent government budgeting system in an environment where the leaders can change seats on such a regular basis. Constituents, as well, need to be comforted that their information will remain safe during any natural or man-made disaster.

Solution:

• Consult with each County Department on exact needs.
• Design and approve recommended solution to share costs and benefits.
• Upgrade existing set of DSL connections to a reliable fiber optic connection to 85under.
• Implement smart switching to share and isolate the bandwidth using VLan technology.
• Review server requirements and software application demands for each department, considering configuration, pricing and options.
• Provision Leased Servers, Leased Virtual Servers (or implement owned servers in Leased Space) for dedicated use at the 85under Data Center.
• All departments may be able to share one or two high performing servers that will be refreshed on a predictable basis.
• Determine needed Intrusion Prevention, Spam/Antivirus Filtering and/or Content Filtering with Software as a Service.
• Collaborate with custom County Government application vendor on the implementation of software, database, backup strategy and thin client capabilities.
• Remotely deploy client side software to workstations and configure automated access to operational software.

Solution Stack:

Vendors:

• Microsoft,
• Trend Micro,
• Cisco,
• & IBM.

Products:

• Windows Server with Hyper-V for server virtualization,
• Remote Desktop Services,
• Cisco ASA,
• Cisco,
• & IBM Server Platforms.

85under Services:

• cloud85 Server,
• Leased Servers, Leased Virtual Servers, and/or Leased Space,
• Online Backups,
• & Software as a Service.

Summary:
County employees in all departments were able to share an extremely fast connection to their servers and the internet, while keeping each office's business private and accessible. During the next major snowstorm, county officials were able to access the data remotely from home, while the courthouse was without power. While county officials were voted into and out of offices, the county IT infrastructure remained reliable in performance and security while predictable in monthly shared cost.