Email Archiving and e-Discovery, Multi-tier Security Architecture, and Server Reimaging

Executive Summary

Overview
Fulton County, formed in 1853 and merged with two other counties in 1932, encompasses 534 square miles and stretches 70 miles in length from its northern-most point to its southern-most point. It includes 11 cities, including the city of Atlanta. The county’s 7,000 employees deliver services that support a citizenry of approximately 915,000 residents. Since the arrival of CIO Robert Taylor in 2000, the Fulton County IT department has distinguished itself for technology innovation.

Challenges
In 2001, when the Nimda worm crippled Fulton County’s computing environment for nearly six months, costing the county approximately $1 million in remediation costs, Taylor and his team embarked on a search to design and implement a multi-tier security infrastructure. Then, when Fulton County lost more than four months of email in August 2003, Taylor and his team recognized the need to overhaul the county’s enterprise messaging infrastructure. A contributing factor was the need to reduce costs through email archiving and e-discovery to meet open records as well as email restore requests. The county also sought a way to provide archiving, search, and retrieval of fax and voicemail, both of which fall under the Georgia Open Records Act.

Concurrent with the security initiative, Taylor and his team rolled out a next-generation multi-tier storage infrastructure based on EMC storage systems. The business continuity solution provides a cost-effective, fully redundant infrastructure that has been acknowledged as a best-in-class solution by the National Association of Counties (NACo) and various other entities. As part of its larger business continuity initiative, Taylor and CTO Terry Gates determined that a reimaging solution for data center servers was needed; with 255 facilities spread across the county, the IT team needed the ability to perform remote server rebuilds.

Solution
Symantec AntiVirus Enterprise Edition is a core component of the multi-tier security infrastructure that Fulton County rolled out in December 2001. The solution includes Symantec LiveUpdate for automated patch updates. For enterprise messaging management, Fulton County, one of the first adopters of the technology, deployed Symantec Enterprise Vault (formerly KVS Enterprise Vault) in March 2004. Symantec Consulting Services provided implementation assistance (over one weekend). Seeking enhanced e-discovery functionality, Taylor and his team added the Discovery Accelerator option in October 2005. At the same time, Fulton County extended archiving and e-discovery for internet faxing and Voice over IP (VoIP). For server reimaging Fulton County rolled out Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery in December 2005.

Benefits
Fulton County is realizing significant business value in three areas: email, internet faxing, and VoIP archiving and e-discovery; security; and server reimaging. The archiving components—both for fulfilling open records requests and providing end users with self-restore capabilities—is producing $1,639,000 in cost savings and cost avoidance over a period of approximately 3 1⁄2 years. Cost avoidance associated with remediation of security breaches, with one intrusion annually, equates to $2,850,000 from January 2001 to December 2006. The business value extends to the server reimaging solution as well, with $37,000 in savings projected from April 2005 to December 2007.

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