Harbor Backup Helps Minnesota State Agencies Maintain Unimpeded Business Operations

Backup and restore service is available to Minnesota's public sector organizations via Internet protocol-based networks.

When you think of Application Service Providers (ASPs), you normally think of entrepreneurs in the private-sector. You might be surprised to learn that the State of Minnesota is actually on the leading edge as an ASP to state and local government agencies. As a bureau within the Department of Administration, InterTechnologies Group (InterTech for short) provides cost-effective data, voice and image services for state agencies. Services are provided to a wide range of public-sector organizations - including city governments and school districts - over the Internet and over a statewide backbone network.

State agencies - many of whom have their own computer centers - are not required to use InterTech services, so the group must meet or exceed their customers' expectations at an attractive price. In that sense, they operate much like a private-sector business, charging for CPU time and storage.

One of the many offerings of InterTech is Harbor Backup and Recovery for PC Servers. InterTech's website describes it as "…a cost-effective solution to a serious business problem: backing up and restoring computerized data in a distributed environment so that daily business operations can continue unimpeded."

Harbor Backup frees LAN administrators and end users from the hassles of backup hardware and software evaluation, installation and operation. It also eliminates time consuming manual tape-handling operations, providing automated management of data across a distributed computing environment. For PC users, backup is a simple matter of clicking on a desktop icon; for servers, backups are scheduled to run automatically. Administrators need only monitor the schedule and operation. Backup is not host driven. Each agency maintains control, deciding for itself what and when it will back up. Restores are also under the control of administrators and users via data unit IDs and user ID/password combinations.

InterTech's success is evident in its long list of users. State-government users include the Governor's Office, the Department of Labor & Industry, Materials Management Division (state purchasing), and the Public Defenders Office statewide. Local agencies such as school districts and the League of Minnesota Cities are also taking advantage of InterTech's services.

A spokesperson from the Department of Public Safety's State Patrol Division sums it up. "Before Harbor, we had a distributed backup that took a lot of time on site at each location to handle hardware and software issues and to train staff to do backups correctly. And even with that work, backups were not reliable and were not offsite…we looked at the costs during the trial period and found that Harbor was a cost-effective solution and provided offsite storage."