Case Study: West Ada School District achieves stronger cyber resiliency and faster recovery with Cohesity

Idaho’s largest school district strengthens cyber resiliency with Cohesity

West Ada School District, Idaho’s largest district, faced mounting cyberrisks and operational strain protecting hundreds of virtual servers and physical devices (including Office 365, SQL databases and its student information system). Its legacy Veeam setup required time‑consuming monthly offline backups (about 12 hours) to create unmodifiable copies, and lacked immutable backups needed to guard against ransomware, outages and other threats.

The district deployed Cohesity (DataProtect, FortKnox and SiteContinuity)—initially a four‑node cluster plus a second appliance for DR—and onboarded FortKnox to protect 10 TB in an immutable cloud vault. The solution enabled daily backups with six‑month monthly retention without the offline backup labor, eliminated the 12‑hour manual process, delivered a ~33x deduplication ratio to cut infrastructure costs, improved RTOs, and added flexible licensing (now covering 5,000 users) plus automated DR failover for near‑zero data loss.

West Ada School District

Keven Denton

Deputy Chief Technology Officer