Mount Dora disaster recovery implementation

Project: Disaster Recovery Implementation
Jurisdiction: Mount Dora, Fla.

Vendor: Quorum
Date completed: January 2013

Mount Dora is located in central Florida and sits alongside Lake Dora. The city is home to about 12,000 residents and has nine vital utility departments, which require a strong information technology (IT) support system: police, fire, water and wastewater, city manager and clerk, public works, library, planning and development, utilities and personnel. Mount Dora’s IT environment supports the entire employee base and is mostly virtual, with three physical HP servers.

Mount Dora is largely unaffected by Florida’s coastal destructive hurricanes, but having a reliable disaster recovery system in place, including fail-safes for IT, is critical to prevent any possible shutdown in the future.

After four years using a previous disaster recovery system, Johnna Shamblin, Mount Dora IT Manager, found the city needed a more reliable long-term solution because of the old system’s overall storage limitations.

Shamblin contacted IT counterparts in other cities to find out what they were using. Through recommendations, she found Quorum, which offered easy-to-manage, automated and on-demand testing capabilities, and a one-click solution to boot up recovery nodes in times of need.

Mount Dora adopted the new system and deployed it in early 2013. Twenty-five of the city’s servers are now protected by the solution.

The system runs an automatic test on a daily basis, providing security and peace of mind for the city. After testing the recovery nodes, the system provides an automatic report by email. For extra precaution, IT Manager runs manual tests of the recovery nodes and restores individual user data about once a month. Through these tests, the IT team knows the system is working.

Mount Dora officals are now confident that the city’s infrastructure is secure and can be restored within minutes if an IT issue were to occur.