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Hi.
I'm Bill McCarty.
And welcome to this episode of Dell Software Customer
Spotlight, the series that introduces you
to the people and companies who have simplified IT,
mitigated risk, and accelerated results
with Dell Software solutions.
Today, we're speaking with Tonia Williams, CIO and IT
director for the Housing Authority of the Cherokee
Nation in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
Tonia built the HACN IT infrastructure
from the ground up and with limited budget,
but she made it all work thanks to a combination
of a positive attitude and the right tools,
like Dell AppAssure, the backup, recovery,
and replication solution from Dell Software.
Hi, Tonia.
Thanks for joining us today.
Thank you very much.
Glad to be here.
Tell us about the Housing Authority
of the Cherokee Nation.
The work here that we do is to help
Cherokee families, citizens, to gain housing,
to help them with their housing needs.
It sounds like a really important mission.
How does IT infrastructure play a critical role
in supporting that?
IT supports the efficiency of the Housing Authority staff.
We're the ones that support everything from the application
process for a client all the way through the ability
to provide the service.
We're the ones that support the backbone of the Housing
Authority.
I know your organization was originally
part of the larger Cherokee government.
How did that separation affect you and your staff?
Well, Housing Authority used to be
a part of the Cherokee Nation.
Back in 2012, we separated as a separate entity
of Cherokee Nation-- still part of the government,
but not part of the tribal government portion.
From that separation back in 2012,
our biggest challenge was an IT infrastructure.
IT somewhat includes way more than simply a computer.
It included all of the services that we've brought over,
all of the servers that we have going,
the network, everything that was in place
we had to mimic and build from scratch.
Wow.
That had to be quite a challenge.
How did that process lead you to Dell and AppAssure?
Well, after looking at some multiple different types
of products, the things that we knew
that we need to have in place, Dell AppAssure
came across actually as a link my husband, believe it or not,
sent it to me.
And it just took my breath away.
How easy it was to use out of the box.
I didn't have to do a whole learning curve.
I didn't have to do hours upon hours of training and set-up
and implementation.
It was very simple.
So after looking at the trial, it was pretty much a given
this is the route we're going to go with.
We've got to have something that will help us with our backups
and recoveries and everything that we needed
as part of the IT infrastructure.
And Dell came through for us.
So it really sounds like we have your husband to thank.
Yeah, he is a system administrator
over at Cherokee Nation, I do have to admit that.
He has the multiple years, but he also
has a lot of the challenges over there at Cherokee Nation.
When even I was over at Cherokee Nation,
doing the servers that we had, we
had the system administration administrative problems
like everybody else.
How do we get our backups?
How do we make a backup?
How do we store the backup?
How do we make sure the backup worked?
We had multiple different types of services in place,
and not everything was as easy as AppAssure was.
So, tell me about some of the benefits you
gain from using AppAssure.
It's a lot easier for us to maintain a lot of our backups,
to even have our backups, make sure
that the integrity is there.
We don't have to do a whole lot of work with it.
We pretty much turned it on and it was ready to go.
We didn't have a whole lot of learning curve to it.
We didn't have to put a whole lot of man hours to it.
Man hours, in turn, is costs and funds and money.
We were able to be proactive with what we were doing,
as opposed to being reactive.
You just mentioned costs.
Can you talk a little bit more about the savings
you've realized through AppAssure?
Cost is a huge piece-- not even just
cost as far as financial budgetary dollars,
but so much is even in time.
We've had to spend a lot of time just getting our infrastructure
together, and AppAssure allowed us to be more proactive
and focus on all of the things that we need to do,
not just the backups.
That's great information, Tonia.
Thank you very much for joining us today
to talk about AppAssure and sharing your story with us.
It was my pleasure.
Thank you very much.
Tonia shared some really impressive results with us.
And if you'd like to learn how Dell AppAssure can help you,
just visit dellsoftware.com/appassure.
Be sure to look for future Customer Spotlights, where
we'll share more stories of customer success
with Dell Software solutions.
Until then, thanks for watching.