Case Study: County of Montcalm achieves ransomware protection and rapid disaster recovery with Unitrends Recovery 933S

County of Montcalm - Customer Case Study

Montcalm County, Michigan — a mid‑sized county government with a one‑person IT department led by Eric McLaughlin — was managing 35 servers across multiple departments on a failing Barracuda tape backup system that was near contract renewal, chronically short on capacity (12 TB across two units) and unaffordable to expand. With limited staff and budget, the county needed a more reliable, scalable backup and disaster‑recovery solution.

Following partner MNJ Technologies’ recommendation, Montcalm deployed the Unitrends Recovery 933S (37 TB physical, ~22 TB compressed, up to one‑year retention) to provide ransomware protection, recovery from accidental deletes and full disaster recovery with the ability to spin up VMs from backups. When a critical server failed, the county ran the application from the appliance, lost only about two hours of work, migrated to a new Hyper‑V host later with no user impact, and avoided significant downtime and replacement costs.

County of Montcalm

Eric McLaughlin

Director of Information Technology