Case Study: Clayton County Public Schools achieves ransomware resiliency and reduced TCO with Cohesity

Large Atlanta School District Selects Cohesity for Reduced TCO and Operational Efficiency

Clayton County Public Schools, which serves more than 52,000 students across 66 campuses south of Atlanta, faced growing ransomware risk and an all‑virtual server environment running VMware that its legacy Dell EMC/Data Domain solution could not protect effectively. Routine backups were slow and cumbersome (often >12 hours), and the district needed an offsite, isolated copy of data to meet cybersecurity insurance requirements.

CCPS deployed Cohesity DataProtect with Cohesity FortKnox (SaaS immutable cloud vault) and two on‑prem nodes including a DR site, consolidating backup, recovery and dev/test workflows. The move cut VM backup times by 98 (from hours to minutes), shortened patch testing by over 90% (now under 30 minutes), met insurance isolation requirements, eliminated costly EMC licensing, and delivered faster, simpler recoveries and improved RPO/RTO.

Clayton County Public Schools

Kurt Pritchett

Sr. Network Engineer