Homewood IT director proposes ThinkGuard co‑managed backup system; item to be added to council agenda

Homewood City’s IT director presented a proposal on Sept. 8 to replace the city’s existing backup and disaster‑recovery systems with a co‑managed solution from ThinkGuard and asked that staff add the contract to a future council agenda for approval.

Justin Stevens, the city’s IT director, told the committee that the current on‑premises appliance had failed to restore reliably earlier in the year and that the department spent roughly 72 hours working with vendor support to recover data. He described that incident as “the nail in the coffin” for the current solution and said the city needs shorter recovery point objectives for critical servers and faster, more reliable recoverability.

Stevens said the ThinkGuard proposal offers continuous or near‑continuous replication options (staff said they would likely schedule critical servers to replicate every 30–60 minutes and mid‑tier servers every four hours, with daily schedules for low‑priority systems). The proposal includes an on‑site appliance plus replication to multiple cloud providers and a co‑managed service with 24/7 monitoring and support. He said the contract would allow the city to fail over and run operations from the vendor’s data center for a limited period (reported in the contract as 20–30 days) without additional fees.

On cost, Stevens reported that the ThinkGuard solution would be roughly $60,000 annually to cover server backups and Office 365/OneDrive/Teams/SharePoint archiving. He told the committee ThinkGuard’s price was about $20,000 cheaper annually than two other solutions the city evaluated. Staff said the current solution’s renewal would occur at the end of October and the vendor lead time for appliances can be roughly two weeks; for that reason Stevens asked the committee to allow the item to be added to the city council’s new‑business agenda so contracts could be executed without a service gap.

Committee members asked operational questions about replication schedules, whether an appliance would remain on site, and the off‑site/cloud replication approach. Stevens confirmed the plan included a local appliance and off‑site replication to multiple clouds and emphasized that the co‑managed service would perform test restores (not simply rely on green “backup succeeded” indicators), and would not charge extra for 24/7 managed restores as part of the agreed service. Stevens also said the vendor would provide run‑time from their data center for the 20–30‑day contingency window before additional charges would apply.

Ending: The committee agreed to place the ThinkGuard contract proposal on the upcoming council new‑business agenda for final consideration; staff will return with the contract documents and procurement details for council action.