Supporting the Mission Across Agency Boundaries

Supporting the Mission Across Agency Boundaries MARKET TRENDS REPORT

Executive Summary Agencies have made great strides in migrating workloads to the cloud, and many are on their way to secure, multi-cloud environments mixing private and public cloud resources. While that’s progress, agencies are finding that it’s not enough to support the use of mission-critical databases and applications across both physical and virtual environments.

Agencies now need to address the emerging requirements of wide-ranging transformation initiatives. The adoption of virtualization, cloud, containers, DevOps and other modern technologies and processes are creating an even wider range of data stores to be managed – and to be mined for insights.

The missing link is a true data-centric architecture – one that ensures that data is in the right place, at the right time and available to the right people. At its core, a data-centric architecture is one that prioritizes data over everything else – how it is accessed, stored, shared and protected. This fundamental shift is the best way for agencies to truly modernize their enterprise IT environments.

To learn more about how agencies can embrace a data-centric approach, GovLoop teamed with NetApp, a data-centric software company, and Tech Data, which provides services, software and hardware to the public sector through value-added resellers, to create this resource.

“Leaders at all levels have a responsibility to manage, understand and responsibly share and protect data in support of our shared mission,” said Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen H. Hicks in a May 5 memo.

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By the Numbers: Diving Into Public-Sector Data

88%

of successful enterprises say that data will be more important to their organization’s decision-making in the next 12 months.

40

45%

28%

75%

of federal respondents to a recent survey said their agencies don’t have a solid grasp on the data they have or where it is located.

of government IT decision-makers say migrating and managing data from legacy systems to the cloud is a challenge.

849

91%

practices in the Federal Data Strategy help guide agencies on leveraging the value of data.

in exabytes is the expected amount of unstructured data that the government and commercial sectors will have within three years.

of federal agencies store mission-critical data in the cloud, while 52% of state and local agencies do the same thing.

of federal respondents say they have all, most or some systems and solutions in the cloud. That number is 93% for state and local government respondents.

SUPPORTING SUPPORTING THE THE MISSION MISSION ACROSS ACROSS AGENCY AGENCY BOUNDARIES BOUNDARIES

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Weaving an Agencywide Data Fabric Challenge: Data Everywhere

Solution: Design a Data Fabric

Agencies are doing their best to move workloads to the cloud and modernize their infrastructure for greater efficiency, productivity, cost-effectiveness and security. In the meantime, they are dealing with such real issues as:

Solving all these issues starts by recognizing that data is the most important asset agencies have. Data is the primary resource for feeding applications, services and processes, so it must be fully accessible and secure at the center of every operation.

• Knowing where your data is, and what data you have: Today, agency data can live virtually anywhere in private and public clouds, legacy databases or at the edge. Sometimes, data even exists in unconnected silos, making it easy to overlook. All this makes it difficult for users to access, share, manipulate and analyze data where and when it’s needed. It also makes it difficult to ensure data is being stored properly.

• Securing data: Compliance, integrity and access control all become more difficult when data is scattered.

It’s also difficult to enforce zero-trust security for data you don’t know you have. If you know where all of your data is, you can take the steps necessary to ensure it’s secure at all points. With all data present and accounted for, it’s also much easier to perform the analytics necessary to provide valuable insights.

• Optimizing data: Without knowing where your data is, how it’s being used and how often it’s being accessed, it’s hard to choose the right location and tier for it, fully protect it and reduce storage costs and performance.

One of the most efficient ways to ensure all data is available, secure and usable is by folding it all into a data fabric. A data fabric is an integrated data architecture with full data management capabilities that keeps track of data no matter where it originated – on premises, in public or private clouds, at the edge of the network or on Internet of Things (IoT) devices. A data fabric ensures consistency across integrated environments. This allows the data to be governed, shared, reused, analyzed and stored most economically.

One of the most important functions of a data fabric is to discover data. Using its data management capabilities, an effective data fabric platform can identify where all data resides at any given time and determine what type of data it is. That means not only finding data in large repositories, but in databases and other repositories that may not be used that often, if at all.

With this level of visibility and detail, it’s much easier to analyze system performance and usage and find ways to improve efficiency, cut costs and gain greater insights.

“The ability to continually optimize your data is incredibly important, and one of the best reasons to consider a data fabric,” said Jeff Beima, Cloud Area Lead for Public Sector at NetApp. “Not only can you optimize data to save money and increase efficiency, but you can choose the best data sets to gain the most insight into any number of productivity, efficiency or security operations.”

A comprehensive data fabric also helps ensure data is fully protected and secure. Because it keeps tabs on where all data is at all times, it can ensure agencies are meeting all downtime recovery objectives and complying with all security mandates. An integrated, optimized data fabric can also support security in other ways, like continuous risk assessments and predictive alerts.

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Best Practices for Adopting a Data Fabric Choose a security-forward data fabric. Most data fabrics should be able to integrate with existing security tools, but that’s not enough. Look for a data fabric that uses the highest levels of encryption and can monitor and analyze all your data wherever it is – on premises, in the cloud, in a third-party data center or at the edge. With these capabilities, you’ll be able to quickly analyze access patterns to identify and mitigate risks. Federal agencies should consider going even further, choosing only data fabrics and other technologies that have been approved by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).

Put flexibility at the top of your list after security. Given enough time, everything changes – data sources, applications, security requirements and even agencies’ missions. Your data fabric should be flexible enough to keep up.

For example, if an agency still operates mostly in an on-premises environment but has plans to move some workloads to the cloud, the data fabric should be able to work across environments. Once in a hybrid environment, agencies also sometimes need the ability to “burst” into the cloud to accommodate occasional or routine spikes. Additionally, there is the flexibility to switch performance tiers better aligned with current workloads and budgets.

Don’t choose a data fabric without verifying that it will work with the rest of your infrastructure. A data platform can give you everything you need, but if it doesn’t integrate with other systems in your environment, it won’t do you much good. That’s especially relevant for agencies, which often must work with a combination of legacy platforms and newer technologies.

Storage isn’t anyone’s little sister anymore. With data taking center stage, storing that data efficiently and securely has become more important than ever. When looking for a data fabric, look for advanced storage capabilities like strong data deduplication and encryption, scale-out performance and capacity, the ability to consolidate workloads, full NVMe (nonvolatile memory express) performance, support for cloud-native apps, automatic tiering to different storage blocks, native replication and zero-trust security-enabling immutable snapshots.

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Case Study: Jumpstarting Justice’s Data When the Justice Department’s (DOJ) Environment and Natural Resources Division (ENRD) was faced with a mandate to quickly move hundreds of terabytes of largely unstructured litigation support data from a data center to the cloud, administrators knew they had to take a moment to think about the best way to do it. Not only did it have to migrate the data, but it needed to ensure secure and continuous access to it. The division’s attorneys and paralegals depend on the data, mostly supporting evidence for environmental pollution cases, to discover valuable information required to build a case. Because the need to access the data is constant, speed and security are critical.

The division implemented NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP software to help migrate and control its storage, while ensuring continuity in data security and access. To complete the migration quickly and securely, the division initially moved its data center hardware to an Equinix data storage swing space. Once there, the data could begin replicating data to the final location on Microsoft Azure. Once complete, the division connected directly to the Azure location. Once connected, ONTAP’s SnapMirror could upload any changes to ensure everything was current before shutting down the Equinix interim storage.

In addition to quickly migrating data to the cloud and ensuring full data security and access, moving to the cloud with NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP helped identify specific workloads ideal for moving to the cloud. Additional capabilities, including data insight and monitoring, helped optimize the division’s investment and maximize success in the cloud.

HOW NE TA PP A ND T ECH DATA HE L P NetApp has helped countless public sector organizations build their own data fabric and securely deliver data, services and applications to the right sources. The result is elimination of data barriers, improved data management and access, better data continuity and heightened decisionmaking. Some of the building blocks of NetApp’s data fabric include:

• Cloud Volumes Platform: This integrative set of storage infrastructures and intelligent data services are deployed and managed on any cloud via an API-driven control plane. It enables near instantaneous point-in-time backup and recovery of production data and easily creates and manages cloud volumes.

• ONTAP data management software: This comprehensive software includes technology to protect data and deliver better availability across the data fabric, compression and deduplication technology to maximize storage.

• Cloud Insights: tools to discover almost anything in the environment across data centers and clouds.

Tech Data Government Solutions brings years of experience, strong supplier relationships and a new vision for government IT, providing a true advantage that partners and suppliers can leverage with confidence.

Learn more: www.netapp.com

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Conclusion There is a reason why more organizations than ever are adopting the data fabric approach. With all data securely managed in a data fabric, agencies can ensure the right data is available to the right users for collaboration, analysis, digital transformation and improved citizen service. The ability to discover, integrate, optimize, automate, protect and secure data under one umbrella results in greater consistency of operations along with stronger security, greater scalability and flexibility, full visibility, lower costs and improved productivity and efficiency.

While the data fabric approach positions agencies well for today, while also helping to ensure that they are ready for whatever comes next.

ABOUT NETA P P

A BOUT T ECH DATA

ABOUT GOVLOOP

NetApp engages in the design, manufacture, marketing, and technical support of storage and data management solutions. It offers cloud data services, data storage software, data backup and recovery, all-flash storage, converged systems, data infrastructure management, ONTAP data security, and hybrid flash storage.

Tech Data connects the world with the power of technology. Its end-toend portfolio of products, services and solutions, highly specialized skills, and expertise in next-generation technologies enable channel partners to bring to market the products and solutions the world needs to connect, grow and advance. Tech Data is ranked No. 90 on the Fortune 500® and has been named one of Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Companies for 11 straight years.

GovLoop’s mission is to “connect government to improve government.”

We aim to inspire public-sector professionals by serving as the knowledge network for government.

GovLoop connects more than 300,000 members, fostering crossgovernment collaboration, solving common problems and advancing government careers. GovLoop is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with a team of dedicated professionals who share a commitment to connect and improve government.

For more information please visist www.netapp.com

For more information please visit www.techdata.com.

For more information about this report, please reach out to info@govloop.com.

SUPPORTING SUPPORTING THE THE MISSION MISSION ACROSS ACROSS AGENCY AGENCY BOUNDARIES BOUNDARIES

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