City of Canton, Georgia

Project: E-mail

The City of Canton, GA, approximately 40 miles north of Atlanta, has a population of 21,000 and was recently recognized as the fastest growing city in Georgia and America’s 5th fastest growing city. The City’s 185 employees were looking to reduce the cost and effort of maintaining an IT infrastructure and increase the reliability of business e-mail and productivity solutions. The legacy e-mail system was difficult to maintain and keep up-to-date.

The City decided to migrate to Google Apps to provide staff members with a more reliable and feature-rich system. Staff members immediately benefited from gaining access to e-mail at home and on mobile devices, and from the increased collaboration available with tools such as group calendar, instant messaging, and shared documents and spreadsheets.

With this cloud-based solution, the City’s IT staff no longer has to handle spam filters, a task that took 20 hours a week to manage prior to migration. IT staff members are also able to use powerful e-mail discovery tools in the new cloud-based solution so that e-mails potentially related to legal investigations are securely archived but easily accessible to approved personnel. The City estimates an annual savings of $10,000 by migrating to cloud computing.