A New Way to Store and Recover Government Data

By Stacey McDaniel

Information is the lifeblood of government. It is no surprise then, that improving data availability, recovery and storage utilization is among the top concerns of organizations in the public sector. However, it often seems like the deck is stacked against the government, as it not only creates new data at an exponential pace but is also faced with ongoing budget and resource constraints.

This scenario often leads to increased data security risks, more downtime and less regulatory compliance.

Today, many software applications can be used simply by accessing them via the Web in an on-demand fashion. Known as "Software as a Service," these offerings are automatically updated, pre-licensed and easy to integrate into an existing IT infrastructure. For government agencies, SaaS can dramatically reduce costs by eliminating licensing fees, maintenance costs and troubleshooting expenses while reducing the amount of labor needed to install, update and repair software housed on agency computers.

A logical choice
SaaS offerings are hosted by the vendor, and they leverage the Web to deliver a service that is priced on a subscription basis. Two widely known SaaS offerings include ADP for payroll services and Salesforce for customer relationship management solutions. New SaaS solutions are extending to the IT infrastructure, going beyond applications to offer complete IT infrastructure protection that includes not only storage but backup and recovery services. Choosing to adopt some vital IT offerings in the form of SaaS can help lessen the burden on time- and resource-strapped government IT departments.

To that point, top government officials are advocating the use of SaaS. Karen Evans, administrator at the Office of Management and Budget, has suggested that it's time for the government to embrace more service-oriented software models.

"We can't continue to maintain all of the things we have," Evans recently said. "We have to start shutting down some of our legacy systems."

Annesh Chopra, secretary of technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, said that SaaS would be a “lynchpin in our strategy moving forward. I actually don't sweat much over licensing fees. I sweat over development costs. It takes time and effort to build applications.” With SaaS, “Apps can come online faster,” he said.

According to Fred Schobert, CTO of the General Services Administration, "Nobody wants to develop software from scratch. The GSA is not in the business of developing software."

That’s a sentiment shared by the OMB's Evans, too: "Our track record is clear: We are not very good at delivering our own software in the time frame set," Evans said. "We're also not very good at managing large projects."

Data keeps coming
One growing burden on government IT is data storage and recovery. As the amount of data continues to grow, the public sector must seek out ways to improve its IT infrastructure and recovery processes. According to the IDC Worldwide Data Protection and Recovery Software 2007-2011 Forecast, "external disk storage capacity, which will increase on average by 50% annually, will require a corresponding data protection capacity." A solid storage and recovery solution should be in place; otherwise organizations will run the following risks:

• Inability to retrieve data in the event of a disaster

• Noncompliance by not retaining data that is secured for a specified amount of time

• Exposure to organizational outages

• Exposure to hardware failure

Handling data can be both challenging and fraught with risk, and concerns about service reliability, data security and recovery constantly loom in the minds of IT managers. Government organizations often require enterprise-class technology but don't always have the resources or capital to address enterprise complexity. That is why so many vendors have developed SaaS offerings for data backup, recovery and storage.

Conclusion
Government data is being created at such a pace that many agencies find it difficult to employ adequate storage and recovery solutions. Government organizations that do not protect their IT infrastructure put themselves at risk by being unable to retrieve data in the event of system downtime or major catastrophic incident. Just in time, Software as a Service has arrived, offering enterprise-level capability at a consistent, affordable price.

Stacey McDaniel has been writing about high-tech issues for more than six years.