Case Study: King County achieves secure, taxpayer-friendly cloud data protection and $150K/year savings with NetApp AltaVault

King County - Customer Case Study

King County, WA — a rapidly growing county serving over two million residents — faced an unsustainable, tape-based backup environment as data grew ~50% annually. The aging process required 2.5 FTEs to manage tape robots and drives, was at full capacity, and left the county choosing between a $1.1M infrastructure refresh or a more affordable cloud-based approach.

King County deployed NetApp AltaVault (AVA400) appliances with Veeam and AWS (implemented by partner Ednetics) to replace tape, achieving inline deduplication/compression (7:1), AES‑256/TLS protection, and support for ~700 Hyper-V VMs and 2 PB of backups. The move avoided a >$1M refresh, saved about $150K annually ($750K over five years), delivers instant recovery for 98% of requests, and freed staff from tape management to focus on proactive IT work.

King County

Aaron Barak

Director of Operations and Infrastructure