Home to the city of Atlanta, Fulton County is the most populous county in Georgia, with more than 915,000 citizens. Fulton County's Department of Information Technology has a 145-person staff that supports the county's 7,000 employees across 42 departments. Like many local governments, Fulton County's IT department is under pressure to manage an ever-growing number of electronic records without increasing spending. Fulton County selected Symantec and its Enterprise Vault, Symantec AntiVirus, and Backup Exec System Recovery products to address its IT security and data management needs.

"Symantec helps us protect our IT environment within a landscape of constantly evolving threats," said Robert Taylor, chief information officer, Fulton County. "The challenges we faced prior to our work with Symantec centered on manageability and functionality, and compelled us to seek out a product set that could easily scale and integrate within the county's new centralized IT model. We needed a solution that would foster the progression of the organization -- not encumber its development. We found the answer in Symantec."

Greater Storage Capacity and Improved Productivity

In 2003, Fulton County experienced a critical server failure that resulted in the loss of several months' worth of employee e-mail records. The experience prompted the county to deploy Symantec Enterprise Vault content archiving software to more securely and efficiently manage its Microsoft Exchange e-mail communications and significantly reduce the impact of potential server failures. Since implementing Enterprise Vault, the county has experienced a 50 percent annual reduction in consumed e-mail storage and saved approximately $180,000 in cost avoidance as a result of improved server performance. In addition, as employees can now restore their own e-mail, Fulton County's IT staff can focus on more strategic initiatives.

Fulton County also uses Symantec Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator, an add-on module to Enterprise Vault, to quickly respond to public records requests. Requests that previously took several employees days or weeks to accomplish can now be completed by one IT administrator in a matter of hours.

"Enterprise Vault requires very little effort on our part, which is one of the greatest benefits," Taylor said. "I used to dedicate a large percentage of IT resources to support public records requests that required us to search through our e-mail stores. Now, I need only one person committed to the task. Enterprise Vault automatically archives e-mail messages and attachments, so users no longer need to spend time deciding which e-mails to keep and for how long."

All-Inclusive Threat Management

Fulton County also relies on Symantec AntiVirus Enterprise Edition for virus protection, content filtering, and spam prevention. The solution provides advanced virus protection and monitoring from a single management console and helps the county's IT administrators efficiently manage security for more than 8,500 computers government-wide.

"The management functionality that comes with the central console of Symantec AntiVirus enhances our efficiency one hundred fold," said Namarr Strickland, chief information security officer, Fulton County. "IT personnel no longer have to constantly monitor what's going right, as they are now flagged to only those issues that need attention. Such advanced features are critical in getting the most out of our resources while providing the highest level of protection possible."

Fulton County's IT administrators have also increased their productivity with Backup Exec System Recovery. Prior to deploying Backup Exec System Recovery, the county's IT staff increasingly encountered hardware failures as older servers ran a growing number of departmental applications. Some failures required that servers be rebuilt manually, taking four to six hours to recover data from tape storage and rebuild the operating system from scratch.

"It reached a point where our service levels for recovery were completely unacceptable," Strickland said. "As we looked for a tool that would allow us to speed up the process, we found many solutions that provided only partial answers. However, Backup Exec System Recovery had the complete package, providing us with a full snapshot and retention of server images and lowering our recovery time from four to six hours down to 15 minutes."

With Backup Exec System Recovery's central management capabilities, county IT personnel can manage backups for servers and workstations in data centers, distributed computing environments, and remote locations, all from a single console. With a consolidated view of enterprise-wide backups, the team is able to monitor isolated systems and quickly resolve problems using comprehensive reporting to maintain information availability.

About Symantec

Symantec is a global leader in infrastructure software, enabling businesses and consumers to have confidence in a connected world. The company helps customers protect their infrastructure, information, and interactions by delivering software and services that address risks to security, availability, compliance, and performance. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Symantec has operations in 40 countries. More information is available at www.symantec.com.

NOTE TO EDITORS: If you would like additional information on Symantec Corporation and its products, please visit the Symantec News Room at http://www.symantec.com/news. All prices noted are in U.S. dollars and are valid only in the United States.

Symantec and the Symantec Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

CONTACT:
Gina Sheibley
Symantec Corporation
+1 (212) 703-7929
gina_sheibley@symantec.com

Pamela Brubaker
Connect Public Relations
+1 (801) 373-7888
pamelab@connectpr.com

SOURCE: Symantec