City of Asheville uses CloudVelocity for disaster recovery

The City of Asheville's IT Services department manages the nerve center for critical city services, from water to sanitation and key facilities, including the 7500 seat US Cellular Center. Like many cities, disaster recovery excellence has been a challenge for City of Asheville; protection was limited to critical apps, and their disaster recovery site was at an undesirable site two blocks away from their data center.

Recently, the city faced challenges finding traditional disaster recovery funding for support for two key apps, one for asset management and the other for arena point of sale transactions. The asset management app is used by the city to track work orders and maintenance and to manage physical assets. An outage required restore from backup with possible loss of one day of data and increased difficulty tracking work orders. The point of sale app supports event ticket sales at US Cellular Center. An outage during an event would impact sales volume until the system could be restored from backup.

A big barrier to disaster recovery protection for these apps included substantial capital outlay requirements. By automating critical processes, CloudVelocity was able to help the Asheville team extend disaster recovery protection to those important apps and enjoy a superior geographic operating model while also improving key disaster recovery objectives.

"The CloudVelocity platform gave us the game changing ability to deploy our important apps on AWS for disaster recovery with minimal budget impact compared to traditional disaster recovery solutions, which either didn't support our physical systems or required prohibitive fixed costs for services," said Jonathan Feldman, CIO of City of Asheville, North Carolina. "What we accomplished together should serve as an example of the higher standards of service and system protection now possible in state and local governments."

Using CloudVelocity, the City of Asheville's operating environment in the data center and cloud are continuously synchronized, including application data updates in on premise databases. In addition to extended protection for important apps, they are able to pay only for usage during tests or outages, and have geographic diversity so they are no longer at risk of power or natural disasters. They were able to go from recovery time objectives (RTO) of 12 hours and recovery point objectives (RPO) in the evenings to RTO of 2 hours and RPO of 4 hours.

"We are thrilled to be working with Asheville's award-winning IT organization," said Rajeev Chawla, chief executive officer of CloudVelocity. "They are blazing trails that promise to significantly reduce disaster recovery duplication waste in the public sector while increasing agility."