Broome County, Binghamton, New York
Making a County's Worth of Connections
Broome County's government has always been one step ahead of the technology curve. For years the county, with the support of County Executive Jeff Kraham, has shown a willingness to invest the time and resources necessary to meet the growing bandwidth demands of county departments, designated agencies, and the various non-profit organizations it serves.
Connecting more than 40 departments, 1,200 computers and 80 servers located at 15 different sites throughout one of the state's largest counties, Broome County has become a high-tech model for other county and regional governments.
Meeting The Bandwidth Challenge
City and state governments across the U.S. are placing a greater focus on interoperability and creating systems that better link information and improve communications. According to IT Director Kim McKinney, Broome County's challenge was to integrate systems to provide more opportunities for collaborative and team-based structures.
"We were quickly outpacing our network capacity. Things were getting slower and slower as we ran more applications over those connections," says McKinney. "We needed a network infrastructure that could support our bandwidth needs now and well into the future - at a reasonable cost. That's why we turned to Fibertech."
Once a choice limited to only major cities, Broome County was able to implement a dark fiber solution from Fibertech to accommodate their accelerating level of data traffic. By connecting remote sites with fiber optics, Broome County is now able to take advantage of a cost-effective solution that provides complete control over its network infrastructure.
"The day that the network was up, we had an application vendor taking advantage of it for us. That's how quickly things started happening," says Lyle Marsh, Assistant IT Director.
Taking Advantage of New Opportunities
The Broome County IT team now has the freedom and flexibility to test new bandwidth-intensive programs and processes, like a "paperless" Social Services office.
"We've chosen a couple of departments to scan documents, store them on a server, and then use that for retrieval purposes," he said. "We can put them on our high-capacity enterprise storage disk drives and also provide backup and maintenance in our data center. Other county departments in other facilities also need access to that application, so it wouldn't have been possible without the fiber being run to multiple locations."
The end result is a collaborative environment using shared resources among a number of remote sites. "We've truly increased the productivity of our IT department and that productivity is filtering down to the agencies we serve," says McKinney. "We always want to be one step ahead of everyone else. With direct fiber optic connections to our offices, when they come to us we're now able to say, 'Yeah, we can do that.'"
"We're exchanging information at the speed of light. We've been very pleased with the whole process and how easy Fibertech is to work with."
"We've truly increased the productivity of our IT department and that productivity is filtering down to the agencies we serve."
Kim McKinney, Director, Information Technology, Broome County