CHALLENGES
Parsram Rajaram, CIO at the City of Winter Park, Florida, recognized the need to protect the city's digital assets and ensure uninterrupted access to essential services. This led him to initiate a strategic modernization and consolidation of the city's data protection. The threat landscape facing state and local governments makes this imperative urgent, as ransomware attacks on government entities consistently target backup data first, and with recovery costs doubling year over year, the impact of a successful attack extends beyond IT.
To establish a secure hybrid cloud environment, the city needed to overcome several critical challenges:
1
Cloud-to-Cloud & Hybrid Backup Capabilities Gap: All existing backups were on-premises with no cloud backup capability, leaving Microsoft 365 data completely unprotected as the city’s workloads migrated to cloud
2
Ransomware Threats: As a Florida government entity prohibited by state law from paying ransom, a successful cyberattack would leave no option but to rebuild from scratch and cause severe disruption to essential city services
3
Capacity Management: Managing capacity needs to ensure cost-effectiveness for workloads migrated to SaaS vendors became an increased focus
OUTCOMES
By adopting Rubrik, the City of Winter Park achieved its strategic goals for modernization, consolidation, and cyber resilience, transforming its data protection infrastructure:
Platform Simplification:
Elimination of the fragmented, complex data protection environment by unifying all on-prem and cloud workloads under a single management platform
Ransomware Mitigation:
Complying with Florida’s prohibition on ransom payments, Rubrik’s immutable, malware-free recovery points ensure the city can always restore cleanly, with no ransom payment ever required or considered
Operational Efficiency:
Automated backup and DR processes, eliminating the risk of human error with manual processes and allowing IT staff to focus on strategic initiatives like the hybrid cloud transition
Resident Safety & Trust:
Sensitive public records cannot be compromised or manipulated, leading to business as usual and a sustained positive relationship between the City and its residents
Unifying Protection for a Resilient Hybrid Cloud
Rajaram viewed Winter Park’s data protection upgrade as a strategic enabler for its transition to a hybrid cloud environment – not simply a technical refresh. The foundational component of that transformation was Rubrik Cloud Data Management Enterprise Fabric (RCDM), which served as the unifying platform, simplifying operations through centralized management and policy-driven automation across the entire hybrid estate. For the first time, on-premises legacy systems and new cloud services could be secured, managed, and recovered from a single platform to uphold the city’s requirements for data security and compliance throughout.
To address the immediate cloud backup gap, the city implemented Rubrik M365 Protection, extending immutable, air-gapped coverage to Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams to ensure critical communication and productivity data was protected far beyond the capabilities of native tools and recoverable in the face of accidental deletion or a cyberattack. Where the city’s previous on-premises environment had no path to protecting cloud workloads, Rubrik closed that gap entirely.
For its hybrid environment, Rajaram deployed on-premises Rubrik appliances (brik) to secure data at the source, including VM protection that was simply not possible with the previous toolset. The brik appliances were integrated with Rubrik Cloud Vault (RCV), hosted in Microsoft Azure, creating a secure, isolated cloud vault for long-term retention and disaster recovery. Together, the brik and RCV ensure a clean, air-gapped copy of data is always available for rapid recovery, directly mitigating the pervasive ransomware threat facing government entities. Policy-based SLA automation enforces protection continuously across the estate, eliminating manual processes and freeing Parsram’s team to focus on the city’s broad hybrid cloud transition.
For the city of Winter Park, Rubrik transformed data protection from a vulnerability into a guarantee, giving Rajaram and his team the confidence that no matter the threat, essential services will remain online, residents will be protected, and the city can recover cleanly, completely, and without compromise.