Kansas State Department of Wildlife and Parks Leverages the Benefits of the Cloud with G Suite

SADA Systems assists State Department of Wildlife and Parks with a G Suite* workaround to comply with strict federal IT guidelines that limited storage to U.S. only data centers.

Customer

Kansas State Department of Wildlife and Parks oversees more than 30 state parks, nature preserves, and fishing lakes and employs roughly 420 employees in five divisions: Executive Services, Administrative Services, Fisheries and Wildlife, Law Enforcement, and Parks.

Challenge

Before SADA, Kansas State Wildlife had already been a G Suite* customer for a few months and loved the collaboration and communication capabilities. This forward thinking organization was preparing to migrate all of its email users to G Suite, but ran into a slight hiccup–due to government regulations, Kansas State Wildlife is required to maintain its email storage strictly on U.S. premises. Gmail is stored in hyper secure databases all over the world so the goal was to find a way to limit the organization’s email storage to only route to U.S. data centers. With the help of SADA Systems, the department was able to fine tune a solution.

Solution

After identifying the organization’s specific needs and comprehensively evaluating government regulations for email storage, SADA developed a viable workaround that ensured complete compliance with aforementioned security policies.

1. SADA migrated data from existing G Suite and legacy email accounts to a secure SADA test domain.
2. Google deleted all data & mailboxes.
3. Google set up the Kansas State Wildlife accounts so emails would be stored in the U.S. only.
4. Afterwards, SADA enables user provisioning and completes the G Suite email migration.

But what happened to emails sent to users during the migration when Gmail was essentially turned off? SADA modified Google Message Security, powered by Postini, to quarantine and hold all messages sent to Kansas State Wildlife during the migration period. Once the email migration was complete, SADA released all quarantined emails. Because the timestamp was retained, users were able to see each message in the order they were received.

Result

With the help of SADA’s thoroughness and knowledge of G Suite’s capabilities, Kansas State Wildlife was able to retain the G Suite communication and collaboration tools it had come to love.

*Note: At the time of this case study, G Suite was known as Google Apps