Case Study: Benton County achieves compliance, faster search, and future-proofed archiving with Smarsh

Risk Mitigation & Future Proofing for Small to Medium-Sized Organizations: Benton County Employs Smarsh Archiving

Benton County, Washington (pop. ~204,000) needed to modernize its email archiving after years of on‑premises retention dating to 2006. Central Services supported 720 mailboxes and faced growing data volumes, search failures during public records requests, and compliance risk under Washington’s public records and open‑meetings laws — issues that eventually required a full FTE to manage archive searches and prompted the county to seek improved search performance and a cloud or hybrid delivery model.

The county migrated to the Smarsh Professional Archive (SaaS) to address those needs, selecting Smarsh for its government track record, GroupWise support, datacenter locations, and social‑media archiving capabilities. The move delivered faster, more reliable search and retrieval for public disclosure requests (allowing the county to clear backlogs), reduced strain on local storage and infrastructure, aligned with the county’s cloud strategy, and positioned Benton County to support social media compliance.

Benton County