Protecting Those Who Protect Us: Police Department with Tight Budget Gains Efficiency and Continuous Data Protection

The Challenge

For the past seven years, Craig Hurwitz has been the sole IT person, managing the entire IT infrastructure for the Barnstable, MA police force. Hurwitz cites three basic challenges to his job. First, “I am a one-man operation taking care of everything.” Second, “Cops are very hard on the computers. If they can break something, they will.” And finally, Hurwitz adds that “there is never any money to invest in anything.” Despite budget and staffing challenges, he supports six servers, several NAS devices, many virtualized desktops plus ruggedized notebook PCs in the cruisers, and two substations.

“Add to that the demand for us to be up 24/7/365, and you get an idea of what my days are like.”

Hurwitz has been in his job for seven years. When he first arrived, a third-party company backed up the police data to an off-site location. Hurwitz describes the process as “an old and antiquated backup system that was cumbersome and not very robust. Recovery efforts were very difficult to perform.” Hurwitz began hunting for a better backup and recovery solution and found Unitrends. “I really didn’t look at anything else after that. Unitrends really had all the bells and whistles I was looking for. Unitrends was the clear winner to me.” Hurwitz purchased a Unitrends Recovery Series 713 hardware appliance to back up everything in his infrastructure. Since the police departments’ locale of Cape Cod can be affected by hurricanes, data is replicated to a storage device at a remote substation to protect against full-on datacenter disasters.