City of Seguin bolsters disaster recovery and cybersecurity

To get an objective assessment of the City of Seguin’s disaster recovery and security posture, the CIO requested an audit from the Department of Homeland Security. The report suggested maintaining a copy of data in the cloud, where it would be insulated from local disasters. On the recommendation of a neighboring municipality, the City chose Cohesity over another leading backup solution vendor. Today the City has a stronger disaster recovery and cybersecurity posture, and IT staff recovered valuable time they can now spend helping other departments innovate and provide exceptional services to citizens.

The Challenge

The population of Seguin, Texas grew from 30,000 to 40,000 in five years, making it the 21st fastest-growing city in the U.S. To serve more residents and businesses, the City is adding staff and innovating rapidly to keep up—a challenge for everyone, including IT. “Our mission in IT is to provide effective, efficient, reliable, and resilient services to help our 25 City departments deliver exceptional services,” says Shane McDaniel, CIO. “We have a responsibility to be good stewards of City data. And we can’t afford lengthy outages that keep residents and those we conduct business with from processing transactions, which in a fast-growing municipality is paramount.”

Until 2025, the IT department’s disaster recovery strategy was based on replicating data across the City’s three data centers. This setup did the basics, but the audit McDaniel requested from the Department of Homeland Security called out some vulnerabilities. “A local natural disaster like a hurricane, flood, or tornado could take down all our data centers, leading to disruption until services could be rebuilt,” McDaniel says. “And every organization is vulnerable to cyber threats because we’re all a click away from unmitigated disaster.”

The Solution

A past president of the Texas Association of Government IT Managers (TAGITM), McDaniel talked to peers about modern data security solutions to strengthen disaster recovery and cyber resilience. “At TAGITM, we like to say the answer to any IT challenge is in the room,” he says. “My counterpart in a neighboring city told me their Cohesity-versus-Rubrik decision was a ‘no brainer.’ That stayed with me, and when I learned that Cohesity’s founder had also co-founded Nutanix, I was confident the two technologies would play well together.”

The City of Seguin funded 90% of the first-year costs of the Cohesity solution through the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program (SLCGP). Cohesity partner Freeit Data Solutions helped Seguin IT staff implement the solution in conjunction with a new Nutanix virtualization platform at the same time—a rarity considering lengthy systems lifecycles. “Cohesity operates seamlessly with Nutanix, which is why we were comfortable deploying both solutions in unison.” “It just made sense,” McDaniel says. Cohesity works with Nutanix minus any complexities. “In almost 30 years working in IT, it’s the easiest major infrastructure migration I’ve ever been privy to,” McDaniel adds.

The City of Seguin now keeps immutable Cohesity copies of Nutanix VMs both on-prem and in Cohesity FortKnox, a Cohesity-managed isolated cloud vault. Differential backups are sent to FortKnox, with QoS dictating network traffic allowing for plenty of bandwidth on the same circuit utilized by critical 24/7/365 data heavy Geographic Information System (GIS) and utilities operational platforms for the rapidly growing community..

The Results

McDaniel points to disaster recovery, business continuity, and data security as the biggest wins of the Cohesity solution for the City of Seguin. “With Cohesity I’m confident we’re doing everything we should to be good stewards of our data,” he says. “We keep an immutable copy of data in the cloud, use multifactor authentication, and require multiple platform administrators to authorize changes to backups. With Cohesity we have peace of mind. If we’re hit by a disaster or cyber event, we’ll be able to recover clean data from the cloud to quickly restore services our City depends on.”

Backups are faster now—just a couple of hours for several TBs, about half the time it took with the previous solution. “Backups would be even faster if we didn’t throttle bandwidth to conserve capacity for other operational applications,” says McDaniel. “And restoring files with Cohesity is essentially instantaneous.” Faster restoration of VMs after a disaster minimizes disruption to services, crucial when it comes to a rapidly growing, full-service community with police, fire, and 911 alongside water, wastewater, and electric utilities.

All that, and the IT staff now spends less time on backups and restoring lost files. “Our team supports more than 500 city employees, so we need to find efficiencies wherever we can,” says McDaniel. “Since we implemented Cohesity and Nutanix, we’re saving around 3-5 hours a week that they can be redirected to other matters.”

Reflecting on how he discovered Cohesity, McDaniel says, “Local governments can be very collaborative. I’ve always viewed the knowledge ascertained from my peers in our sister cities and counties as an extension of staff, no sense in reinventing the wheel if you don’t have to. I took to heart my peer’s observation it was a no-brainer to choose Cohesity. In the future I’ll be making that same recommendation to pay it forward to the next community.”

Key Benefits

• Stronger disaster recovery posture
• Stronger cybersecurity
• 3-5 hours/week less management burden
• 50% faster backups
• Near-instantaneous file restoration

About City of Seguin

Located along the banks of the Guadalupe River, Seguin, Texas, is a regional hub for manufacturing, retail, and healthcare, known for its natural beauty, historic downtown, skilled workforce, and strong manufacturing presence. The City of Seguin government has approximately 500 employees spread across 25 departments and has won several awards for tech innovation since 2018.