I would take these guys out, do an interchange with Amazon and Google, and make them spend six months or a year seeing how it's done, and learning the way you interact with data. What I see, and I worked in the public service, is typically an IT solution, because there are limited resources. If it's difficult to do, we're going to make it really simple. We just won't make it accessible, right.
If you have a server that's not plugged into the network, then you do not have the risk of somebody actually coming in and stealing that data, but it doesn't solve the problem. It cripples you as well as technically protecting your organization. It becomes a silo of collections that provides no value. Truthfully, if you're not going to use the data, then why do you collect it in the first place?