Grimes County Sheriff’s Office Handcuffs Data Disasters with Arcserve

The Grimes County Sheriff’s Office has already suffered one disastrous data loss incident from a malware attack. Learn how Arcserve helps ensure that never happens again.

About The Office of Sheriff for Grimes County, Texas

Established in 1846, the Sheriff’s Office in southeastern Texas’ Grimes County serves its community from the county seat of Anderson. Under current Sheriff Donald G. Sowell the Office is dedicated to providing honest, efficient, and courteous law enforcement and public service to its citizens, and preserving the integrity and legacy of the Grimes County Sheriff’s Office.

The Challenge

When Grimes County was hit by a hacking attack in 2018 the consequences were serious. Emotet Malware was found on 55 devices on its network, forcing an immediate allocation of emergency funds from the County Commissioners Court to remediate the problem. “Before I took over running IT for the county it suffered a major failure in its law enforcement division from the malware attack,” said Gregg Cannon, Director of IT for Grimes County. “I also inherited a failing legacy storage subsystem that crashed following the attack, and we lost about a year’s worth of squad car and police body cam videos used for evidence. We can’t allow that to ever happen again, so it was critical for our county to put a solution in place that was scalable, flexible, and robust, and that completely protects our data.” The solution also had to be easy to integrate with the Sheriff’s Office’s existing WatchGuard squad car and body cam video system and evidence management software. 

The Solution

Cannon looked at solutions from Dell, HP, and others, but found them all to be both expensive and complex to implement. Then he reached out to Enterprise Systems, who told him about Arcserve’s unique storage solution, OneXafe®, an object-based converged data platform with scale-out storage and enterprise-class data protection, obviously a critical requirement for Grimes County. “We needed an enterprise-class solution that was easy to use,” said Cannon. “That’s what we found with Arcserve.” When the Enterprise Systems’ rep told Cannon that he had a demo OneXafe appliance available for trial, he jumped at the opportunity. “We implemented the demo model, and the benefits were immediately obvious. So we ordered a complete solution from Arcserve,” said Cannon. “Our first priority was replacing the Sheriff’s Office’s entire legacy storage system.” Arcserve worked closely with Cannon throughout the process, ensuring a smooth transition. Arcserve’s scale-out storage solution makes it possible for Grimes County to start with the amount of storage it needs to meet its current requirements while making it easy to cost-effectively add more storage at any time.

The Results

“The Arcserve solution is very easy to set up,” said Cannon. “It took less than an hour to put the appliance into the rack, configure the software, and get the solution up and running.” Today, the county is confident that it can withstand ransomware and malware attacks thanks to OneXafe’s continuous data protection feature, which creates an immutable snapshot of the data every 90 seconds. “We are confident that we are well prepared for an attack now that we have the Arcserve solution in place,” said Cannon. “And the platform works seamlessly with our existing WatchGuard software. We’ve also trained our employees on how to identify potential SPAM emails so they can do their part to protect our network.” Grimes County has also reduced its data storage requirements as a result of OneXafe’s inline deduplication and compression, which delivers data reduction ratios as high as 5:1. “Arcserve is a perfect fit for Grimes County,” said Cannon. “We’ll likely be implementing the Arcserve solution in other county departments in the future.”

Key Differentiators

“I can’t say enough about how well the Arcserve solution has performed in meeting our data storage and protection requirements,” said Cannon. “And knowing that we can cost-effectively meet our future storage requirements with OneXafe’s scale-out storage platform is a real plus.”