From Court to Control: How Webb County, Texas Took Charge of Cloud Data

What’s involved for state and local governments to pull back old files from hyperscale cloud storage? For Joseph Hernandez, Senior Systems Administrator for Webb County, Texas, the answer usually meant a court case. That’s because restoring old files often comes with egress fees, and any unplanned expense has to be approved by the county's commissioners court before it can be paid. By the time a request works through the court, then legal, then the vendor, Joseph's team would be looking at up to six weeks before they could access their own data.

Joining Hernandez in a recent conversation with Wasabi was Gus Ornelas, the county's Lead Systems Administrator. Together, they talked through the realities of budgeting for state and local government, and what changed once Webb County made the move to Wasabi for long-term data retention and compliance. That shift, they explained, reshaped how the county manages its most sensitive data and plans for the years ahead.

A budget request stood between IT and its own archives

Webb County ran everything on-premises for years, backing up to disk through Dell Data Domain. As their volume of data grew over time, expanding that physical infrastructure stopped making financial sense. So their contact at Dell introduced Webb County to Wasabi, one of the first times the department had put its data in the cloud. Most of it is there for compliance, Hernandez said, with disaster recovery as a secondary reason, a way to restore county systems if something in the past needed to be pulled back.

Moving that data off Webb County's on-prem appliances and into Wasabi was handled by CloudSoda by Diskover, which the county paired with Wasabi to offload the archive without disrupting what was already running. The setup went fast: IT was up and running within a week. "Our Dell team has been great, always available and always straightforward," said Ornelas. "They helped us map out storage for five years and make the move to Wasabi seamless."

Wasabi addressed the county's storage challenges in two clear ways. It no longer cost additional, unexpected fees for moving data in or out, and it was clearly less expensive than expanding Webb County on-prem infrastructure.

Those two areas of savings together did more than just cut their bill. Cutting the fees out of the equation ended the lengthy wait entirely. Pulling archived data doesn’t trigger a court process. "We don’t want to pay for data to come out, especially since it’s our data,” said Hernandez.

For a department used to budgeting around uncertainty, removing an entire category of unplanned expenses meant IT no longer had to plan around a cost it couldn't predict.

Evidence doesn’t share a server

Cost wasn't the only reason Webb County moved to Wasabi. Some of the county's data doesn't just need to be stored. It needs to hold up in court.

The district attorney's office generates that kind of data, everything from evidence and forensics to videos. Data like that can't be treated the way the county treats an email backup or a shared drive. It runs on its own physical server, and even backing it up couldn't be handled on-prem, so Wasabi took that on directly, apart from the retention and compliance data already stored there.

Keeping the data itself separate was only part of the challenge. The DA's office also runs on its own budget, funded independently from the rest of the county, and it needed a way to spend that money on its own storage rather than draw against Webb County's shared account. Wasabi Account Control Manager (WACM) gave them exactly that.

The DA's office runs its own sub-account inside the same Wasabi environment, an allocation Hernandez put at roughly 200 terabytes, billed and managed independently from the rest of the county's storage. If the DA's office ever needs more, it can buy more on its own account, without touching Webb County's shared capacity.

What Webb County built for one office is really a template for the public sector. WACM is designed as a single console that handles sub-account creation, administration, and billing in one place. Any government body juggling multiple departments (each with its own data sensitivity, budget, and approval chain) can run all of it on one Wasabi environment without collapsing it into a single shared account. Webb County didn't have to stand up a second environment to keep the DA's office separate, or manage a second invoice to keep its budget distinct. It just added a sub-account.

Five years of steady pricing

Webb County buys storage the way it buys most things: in five-year cycles. Dell told the county how much storage it would need for the next five years, and Webb County bought that amount outright rather than pay as it went. They did that through Wasabi Reserved Capacity Storage (RCS) pricing, which lets customers prepay for a fixed block of capacity over a set term instead of billing for usage month-to-month.

The reasoning was straightforward. “We prefer long-term contracts because we don’t want surprises,” said Hernandez. “With Wasabi Reserved Capacity Storage, we know what we’re spending for the next five years, and we don’t have to go back to court for approval.”

What this means beyond Webb County

Government budgets work on their own terms. They're planned years in advance, approved through a process that isn't built to move quickly, and rarely have room for a cost nobody planned for. Wasabi's pricing was built around that reality rather than around a business that can absorb a surprise invoice and move on. 

"We like the fact that Wasabi doesn’t charge fees, because other places charge for ingress and egress," Hernandez said. "We also like the total overall savings we have with Wasabi compared to other vendors."