What Hosting Options Work Best for Your Tribe?
By Jacob Brandes
Security is a crucial aspect of tribal data. Strong security measures ensure that tribal member data is protected from hacks, breaches, or being accessed by unauthorized individuals.
RiteTrack is one of the only case management softwares that allow the option for either on-premises hosting with the tribe’s IT team or hosting with Lunavi, a state-of-the-art private data center. Both offer advantages and considerations, and the right choice depends on your resources, infrastructure, and available staff.
Hosting On-Premises
When a tribe has the staff and infrastructure to host a system on their own servers, an on-premises setup can be an excellent option.
- Greater Control: The IT team manages and maintains the physical servers, network configurations, and security protocols.
- Data Sovereignty: All data is stored on tribal infrastructure, remaining fully within your tribe’s physical control.
- Configuration Flexibility: With direct access to the system environment, IT can take advantage of RiteTrack’s built-in configuration options-such as setting dropdown choices for faster data entry, customizing reports, managing user security, and updating form templates. This allows the IT team to align the system with any of the tribe’s specific processes, maximizing system control and sovereignty.
At Handel, we work with your IT team to set up a backup plan that mirrors our process with the private database center, Lunavi, ensuring data protection and disaster recovery. This option is a good fit for tribes with robust IT capabilities who want direct oversight of every aspect of their data and systems.
Hosting In Private Database Center
For many tribes, managing the additional workload of hosting and maintaining software can take IT away from supporting day-to-day departmental hardware. With this hosting option, Handel hosts RiteTrack with Lunavi, a secure, state-of-the-art private database center. Like Handel, Lunavi is located in Wyoming.
- Reduced IT Burden: Freed from hosting duties, the IT team can focus on supporting staff devices, troubleshooting, and other priorities.
- State-of-the-art Hosting Environment: Lunavi is designed for security, stability, and high uptime, ensuring your system is accessible when staff need it.
- Comprehensive Backup & Data Ownership: Handel handles all backups, including offsite storage, and maintains a self-backed-up copy of your system code locally. Your data remains fully owned by your tribe and is never sold or shared. (If you would like to read more on data ownership, check out this blog)
This hosting approach works well for tribes that prefer to avoid the costs and staffing requirements of managing their own server infrastructure but still want strong data security and reliable support.
Choosing What’s Right for Your Tribe
Both hosting options provide strong security, comprehensive backups, and full data ownership for your tribe—the main difference is how much a tribal IT team wants to manage.
With on-premises hosting, the IT team maintains the environment, and your Handel project manager can help set up a backup plan that mirrors our process with our private database center, Lunavi—just in case. They can also use RiteTrack’s many configuration options (like dropdown choices, report and user security, and form templates) to fit the system to the Tribe’s needs.
While with Lunavi, Handel coordinates everything from server upkeep to offsite backups, plus we keep a self-backup code copy locally.
No matter which option you choose, Handel ensures that tribal data is protected, accessible, and always under your ownership.
Give us a call to discuss what hosting option would work best for your Tribe.
