Government Agency Transforms Operations With Flexible, All-in-One Hybrid Cloud Solution, Breaks Down Information Silos

Overview

Challenge

• Eliminate silos, modernize systems and processes and integrate disparate IT systems to empower the workforce.

Solution

• Migrated to a flexible, secure, private hybrid cloud that facilitates experimentation and prototyping of solutions.

Outcome

• Gave workers instant access to innovative platforms to execute on projects.
• Brought data and processes together to break down obstructive silos.
• Vastly improved agency’s awareness of cloud capabilities..
• Minimized resource requirements to reduce operational costs.

Challenge

Bring Everything Under One Umbrella

Keeping up with the accelerating pace of technology is a challenge for every organization, but for government agencies the task is even more onerous. In addition to securing their entire environment, agencies must also govern data across the organization, maintain the efficiency of IT services, and keep a handle on licensing costs. One government agency needed to change, but with an IT environment consisting of data silos and disparate legacy systems, they faced an uphill battle.

Without a unified environment, they did not have the visibility to centrally monitor and manage their systems, applications and data. To make matters worse, the agency's workload involved memory- and CPU-heavy processes, which were becoming very resource-intensive and time-consuming for its current systems. They knew they needed to transform their IT environment.

Like many organizations, the agency decided to transition to the cloud, but they needed to start by laying some groundwork. Its decision-makers needed to understand the types of cloud services available and ensure that all government security requirements could be met. The agency needed a partner because it lacked the internal resources to deploy cloud services. They found a partner in Hitachi Vantara.

Solution

Move to an All-in-One Hybrid Cloud

Hitachi Vantara worked with the agency to deliver a hybrid cloud solution. With its deep experience in delivering solutions to the public sector, Hitachi Vantara knew there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Hitachi Vantara worked with the agency to customize and deploy a solution to meet their requirements. The all-in-one, pre-engineered, hybrid cloud solution combined several products, including Hitachi Unified Compute Platform CI, Hitachi Enterprise Cloud, Hitachi Content Platform Anywhere and Pentaho Business Analytics. Together, these products provided the agency with a cloud infrastructure-based self-service catalog to instantly provision platforms and operating systems.

The complete hybrid cloud solution was implemented in only a few days, with seamless integration from start to finish. As part of the implementation process, Hitachi Vantara provided workshops for agency members focusing on UCP deployment and cloud best practices. These workshops were key in creating strategic plans. With the hybrid solution, the agency can achieve a public cloud experience with the control and security of a private cloud environment — one that accelerates deployment. Add the onboard analytics from Pentaho, and the agency is equipped with a powerful foundation for future innovation.

Outcome

Eliminated Obstacles, Accelerated Collaboration and Innovation

Today, the agency is well on its way to realizing a culture that makes the most of agile development, enriched collaboration, and centralized governance. The deployment of a highly secure hybrid cloud environment is already providing significant benefits. By unifying disparate systems and silos, the agency’s users now have a consolidated view with a central management interface. The new environment improves governance and auditability, easily scales with more workloads, and improves efficiency across the organization.

After only a few months, the hybrid cloud solution is already delivering cutting-edge platforms and technologies, including analytics on demand, blockchain development on demand, artificial intelligence and more. The agency is also using the solution to prototype innovative solutions using agile methodologies. Perhaps most important, the solution has put the agency in a position to incorporate the cloud into daily operations, reach objectives faster and enable new opportunities.

Before the hybrid cloud was implemented, for example, the agency’s data scientists relied on several different departments for their data and tools. Their ability to experiment and innovate was hampered by the difficulty in simply getting the tools they needed. But the hybrid cloud wiped away many of these dependencies. Now the data scientists can now focus less on IT and more on achieving the goals and outcomes that their department prioritizes.