“We needed reliable offsite backup in the event of a natural disaster or ransomware attack and needed to do it on a tight public sector budget. Wasabi not only met my budget requirements, but their policy of not charging for egress or API calls is ideal because I can’t add funding to that budget line every time we pull data or do more testing in a given month.”

– Aaron Miller, Director of IT, Hardin County Government

Overview

Hardin County, situated in the heart of Kentucky, is a thriving community with a diverse economy including everything from agriculture to advanced manufacturing. It’s also home to the United States Bullion Depository, better known as Fort Knox, the notoriously impregnable vault where the U.S. Treasury stores more than half the country’s gold reserves. It’s no wonder, then, that security and saving money were top of mind for Aaron Miller, Hardin County’s Director of Information Technology, as he searched for a cloud storage provider. In reality, his reason was more pragmatic. “We needed reliable offsite backup in the event of a natural disaster or ransomware attack,” said Miller, “and we needed to do it on a tight public sector budget.”

Searching for a cloud backup and recovery solution on a public sector budget

Miller was eager to move Hardin County from operating entirely on-prem to a hybrid IT model. Using cloud storage for backup and recovery seemed like an ideal entry point for a hybrid-cloud architecture. “We looked at AWS, Google, and Azure for our cloud storage backend, but our budget was in no way compatible with their pricing,” explained Miller. “Heck, we couldn’t even afford them with our budgets three to five years out!” Realizing that they were not going to be able to help him, the provider that Miller was in discussions with actually recommended Wasabi. “They said, ‘Why don’t you look at Wasabi? They have a great reputation and they can do what you’re needing to do at a lower cost.”

Low cost and price predictability were key factors

At 1/5th the cost of AWS S3, Wasabi hot cloud storage appeared to be exactly what Miller was looking for, but low cost was not the only factor in his decision. Pricing also needed to be predictable. “I can’t add funding to that budget line when we pull data or do more testing in a given month,” said Miller. “So, the fact that Wasabi doesn’t charge for egress or API requests gave me the cost transparency and predictability I needed.” Miller opted to go with Wasabi’s Reserved Capacity Service (RCS), which enabled him to lock in an even lower price and pay for cloud storage the same way he pays for other on-prem solutions. “RCS gave me the best bang for the buck,” said Miller.

Ransomware protection sealed the deal

Wasabi’s data immutability feature for ransomware mitigation was also a major factor in Miller’s decision. “It seems every day we hear about another organization getting hit with a ransomware attack, ‘’ said Miller. “With Wasabi, if we were ever to get hit with ransomware, we would be able to reinstall the operating systems then bring down our backup from Wasabi within a matter of minutes. Knowing we have all of our data safe and secure really helps me sleep at night.”

Simple to set up, simple to use

Wasabi is 100% bit-compatible with the AWS S3 API so IT professionals don’t need to make any changes to their S3-compatible applications, gateways, or other appliances. “Our Synology on-prem NAS server worked flawlessly with Wasabi,” said Miller. “We were up and running in a few clicks; it was literally just a few minutes to set up the Wasabi account and start backing up data and there were no hiccups. I was really impressed.” Miller was also impressed with Wasabi’s easy-to-use interface. “I really like the Wasabi platform, how easy it is to go in and create a new bucket and sync it with our on-prem solution. That was, hands down, a very useful tool and I can do it from anywhere.” With his on-prem storage solutions, Miller needs to be onsite and on a specific workstation. “With Wasabi, if we ever have a problem and I’m at home or on vacation, I can have someone on-site change out the server and I can start the DR replication from anywhere and be syncing files in a matter of minutes. It’s that simple.”

Up next: video surveillance, infrastructure monitoring with Splunk, and Esri mapping data storage

Wasabi’s breakthrough price-performance has created many new possibilities for Hardin County to reduce their on-prem storage footprint even as they light up new services. “We planned to use Wasabi for backup only,” explained Miller, “but due to our great experience, we are evaluating Wasabi’s hot cloud storage as a primary storage target for our Esri solution for mapping the County. We’re also looking at storing our network management and analysis data generated by our soon-to-be implemented Splunk solution so we can quickly retrieve it for our forensic investigation in the event of a cyberattack.”

Video surveillance will also be a growing source of data for the County. “We run onsite video surveillance for our building that’s being stored on another Synology unit. Footage was held for a minimum amount of time, but after that, we had to let it go in order to save storage space. Now, instead of deleting those files, we are pushing them to Wasabi for maximum storage time, which is exceeding our retention expectations. Wasabi will be a great solution for storing all types of video files from law enforcement to public safety.”