Clayton County Public Schools in Georgia Selects Cohesity

Cohesity, Inc. announced that Clayton County Public Schools (CCPS) has adopted its FortKnox, a SaaS data isolation and recovery solution, to protect and recover data in the event of a cyberattack such as a ransomware attack.

CCPS is the 5th largest school district in Georgia, serving over 50,000 students.

The FortKnox SaaS offering is designed so that the school district’s critical data can be saved and accessed through a virtually air-gapped and immutable data copy stored in the cloud.

If the school district is hit by a cyberattack, this copy can help the district recover data, avoid paying the ransom, and keep schools operating. The addition of FortKnox also enabled the district to qualify for cyber insurance, while improving BC, and offering greater efficiency, time, and cost savings.

“Like many enterprise environments, we at Clayton County Public Schools were looking to update our 3-2-1 backup strategy to enhance cyber resiliency and protect vs. increasingly sophisticated ransomware attacks. The simplicity and convenience of the FortKnox SaaS offering was just what we needed to achieve this while reducing operational complexity and meeting demanding SLAs,” said Kurt Pritchett, senior network engineer, Clayton County Public Schools. “With FortKnox, we now have an isolated, immutable copy of our critical data in the cloud without having to manage an offsite data vault ourselves, saving a lot of time and budget that can be utilized to better serve our students and teachers.” 

Traditional do-it-yourself offerings to create a data vault, such as shipping tape offsite or maintaining parallel infrastructure are ill suited for multicloud, hybrid world. FortKnox offers a managed solution that eliminates much of the complexity and overhead of traditional offerings, while helping meet stringent recovery SLAs. It helps maximize the school district’s IT resources by supplementing the IT team’s existing skill sets with proactive threat monitoring and protection combined in one consolidated interface.

“Honestly, it doesn’t get any easier than this. SaaS solutions are what every K-12 needs when you are hard-pressed to find the right talent pool. It was easy and fast to deploy and has simplified our entire environment. With FortKnox, we were able to vault all our data to the cloud in a couple of hours without having to deal with the overhead of managing cloud storage buckets ourselves,” adds Pritchett.

FortKnox
It is a SaaS data isolation and recovery offering that is part of Cohesity’s Data Management as a Service portfolio of offerings that run on AWS. It is designed to provide an additional layer of off-site protection through geographical, network, and management isolation, while simplifying operations and lowering costs compared to magnetic-tape and self-managed data vaults.

• Case study: Atlanta School District Selects Cohesity for Ransomware Resiliency and Reduced TCO
• More about Cohesity’s Threat Defense Architecture