Rock County Case Study

Located in south-central Wisconsin, just 100 miles outside of Chicago, Rock County employs about 1,200 people across 29 different departments ranging from the Health department to the Sheriff’s Office, as well as Public Safety, that process large amounts of data every day. Mickey Crittenden, CIO for Rock County, leads the Information Technology team who maintains the county’s mission critical storage and server equipment that house that data.

When it came to making decisions for the next fiscal year, Rock County CIO, Mickey Crittenden, was faced with many challenges. Traditionally, Crittenden’s team took a conservative approach to hardware maintenance by working directly with the OEM for service and support. However, as equipment aged and reached its end of service life or end of warranty, the team felt they had no choice but to refresh their hardware. The county’s IT department was limited in their budget on what could be spent towards hardware maintenance.

“If a piece of hardware was still reaching its requirements, there was no reason to refresh,” Crittenden stated. “We followed a strategy to get as much life out of our equipment as much as possible. However, sometimes that strategy does not align very well with the OEM’s offering.”

With the pressure to refresh, and a tight budget, Crittenden began researching third-party maintenance options to ensure the lifecycle of his equipment was extended as much as possible.