The County of Sacramento is home to nearly 2 million people as well as the California state capital. The County's administration employs thousands of people in over 30 departments, including Emergency Services, Transportation, Regional Parks, and Sanitation. To do their jobs, these employees need easy access to data, anywhere and anytime.
Many County employees are mobile workers. Emergency Services workers are obviously out and about, even when they’re not responding to an emergency. Regional Parks employees routinely work outside, where they depend on cellular communications. The Water Resources department has begun a massive research study involving engineers from numerous County agencies and these engineers need to be able to create, access, share, and collaborate on files from locations throughout the County.
Round-the-clock mobile access to data isn't the only requirement for county employees. Security is paramount. That's why the County's IT organization was concerned about employees using public-cloud file-sharing services like Dropbox and Google Drive to store and access files containing sensitive information about critical infrastructure projects, as well as protected health information (PHI) and personally identifiable information (PII).
"Name any storage provider, and it has the potential for presenting major security risks for County employees," says Brian Goshorn, senior IT analyst with the County. "We received a directive from our CIO to find a single, secure solution that could be adopted across all County departments and made the standard for internal and external information sharing."
In its search for a secure, enterprise-grade content and collaboration solution, the County had three major requirements:
- Security
The solution had to provide rigorous security controls and be able to be deployed on a private cloud, fully under control of the County
- Seamless Access
The solution needed to provide easy access to all the County's existing Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint, without requiring mobile workers to use a VPN
- Collaboration
The solution needed to do more than simply provide a means of uploading and downloading files. It needed to support true collaboration with tools for organizing files, searching for content, editing and commenting on files, managing tasks, and spearheading workflows and projects.
After reviewing several vendor options, the County of Sacramento selected kiteworks, Accellion's secure content collaboration platform. Today, Accellion provides County employees efficient and secure access to County documents, pictures, videos, and forms, ensuring that County employees and their external partners can share and collaborate on the content they need, from any location.
"The kiteworks platform is a huge security and efficiency story for us," says Goshorn. "We have achieved the highest levels of data security and control, and our employees are able to work smarter and faster with external agencies, vendors, and partners."
Learn More
To learn more about the County of Sacramento’s content collaboration requirements and how they’re meeting those requirements with Accellion, download the case study.