State Attorney’s Office for Florida Selecting CommVault and Iron Mountain

The Office of the State Attorney for Florida’s 15th Judicial Circuit in and for Palm Beach County, is taking advantage of integration between solutions from CommVault and Iron Mountain Incorporated, enabling them to keep pace with data growth, drive down storage costs and increase operational efficiencies.

The lynchpin to the office’s success in serving its community’s criminal justice needs is strong collaboration among prosecutors, investigators and law enforcement. Increased use of digital evidence and electronic arrest filings caused data storage to double, taxing the existing storage infrastructure while increasing the costs and administration of offsite tape rotation. Using CommVault Simpana software and its integrated cloud storage connector, the State Attorney’s Office moves backup and archive data securely, reliably and transparently into Iron Mountain’s cloud archiving platform.

From a single console, the IT team can manage and retrieve archives stored on the scalable platform at a projected cost savings of 44 percent over traditional offsite tape rotation. Organizations have traditionally shied away from storing their information in the cloud; now CommVault customers can take advantage of Iron Mountain’s security and the integration with Simpana 9 to reduce the costs and risks of managing their information in the cloud.

According to the State Attorney’s Office, the addition of Simpana software’s embedded deduplication also enables the organization to reduce redundant data by up to 90 percent; this decrease in storage footprint allows the team to use CommVault software to drive efficiencies and better leverage existing infrastructure, thereby avoiding a $60,000 capital expenditure for SAN upgrades.

Verdict on Cloud Storage Gains
CommVault’s cloud connector takes advantage of native REST over HTTP connectivity to simplify deployment with Iron Mountain’s cloud archiving platform; no complex scripting or gateway appliances were required, which according to the State Attorney’s Office enabled them to realize a five-to-one savings over other cloud storage solutions. The State Attorney’s Office claims that moving backup data to the cloud has lowered administration costs by 20 percent.

Additionally, data can be recovered quickly, removing the time delay and additional management required previously. Offsite backups are stored in multiple places within the cloud-based archive system for elevated disaster recovery. Heightened security, including CommVault’s embedded encryption and Iron Mountain’s AES encryption and VPN tunneling, ensures the safety and integrity of sensitive data moving into, and out of, the cloud archive.

A dedicated, four-person IT department at the State Attorney’s Office supports more than 3,000 users, including more than 100 prosecutors, nearly 200 office staff and 27 different law enforcement agencies.

Michael McAuliffe, State Attorney for Florida’s 15th Judicial Circuit, said: "Our relationship with investigative law enforcement is the lynchpin of our success. This latest move to embrace cloud storage using CommVault and Iron Mountain technology is a great example of how technology can raise the bar in information sharing and process efficiency while lowering operational costs. I have a great interest in vetting new technologies that can save money because we are funded with taxpayers’ dollars. We performed a careful cost/benefit analysis, which helped us project cost savings of 44 percent by moving backup data to the cloud. The integration between these CommVault and Iron Mountain platforms appears seamless, which I anticipate will lead to straightforward and cost-effective storage that ensures the delivery of accurate and timely information from my office to officers on the street."

Dan Zinn, CIO for the Office of the State Attorney’s 15th Judicial Circuit, said: "We take every precaution to safeguard crucial information. CommVault and Iron Mountain play major roles in this area as we will not compromise when it comes to providing a secure, reliable and scalable environment for managing, retaining and accessing all case-related data. As soon as we heard that CommVault and Iron Mountain were working together to deliver a cloud-optimized offering, we wanted it right away. Together, CommVault and Iron Mountain had a compelling solution for reducing the complexity of moving and managing data into the cloud. We’re achieving up to 90 percent reductions in redundant data with CommVault’s deduplication, which decreases the footprint before it’s backed up, sent over the network and stored in the cloud. Deduplication helped us save $60,000 in capital expenditures by avoiding a SAN upgrade."

Florida State Attorney’s Office for the 15th Judicial Circuit case study