APIS IT Delivers Government Cloud in Croatia

APIS IT provides IT services to public and government sector organisations in the Republic of Croatia, running nearly 90% of the government's critical systems and developing the government cloud. Pure Storage is central to the cloud, laying the groundwork for future public services.

After the European Union (EU) announced its government cloud initiative, which would provide funding for up to 85% of infrastructure deployment for member states, the Croatian government solidified a vision for cloud services in the public sector. To support this vision, APIS IT formed the Shared Services Center (SSC) team led by Mladen Gorseta, Executive IT Architect, to handle design and operation of hardware and software, the virtualization and automation layer, and cloud services for government entities.     

A key challenge was that policies and processes needed to be standardised across all government departments and service providers. This included rethinking data storage policies and consolidating hardware to drive efficiencies. Having outlined plans that were compliant with the EU program requirements, the SSC was granted funding.

The success of the government cloud initiative relies on many components across multiple layers working together. The flexibility of the Pure Storage platform allowed APIS IT to begin with a small deployment of FlashArray and FlashBlade, which scaled effortlessly as their volumes grew, driven by strong performance and seamless integration with VMware and Oracle environments. 

“Pure Storage helped us build a centralised storage system, consolidating hundreds of separate servers into two very efficient and secure data centres that form the backbone of our government cloud,” says Gorseta.

With Pure Storage, APIS IT now has a high-speed centralised storage environment for its transactional databases, which underpin cloud applications that deliver services such as central registers, a data analytics platform, a central healthcare system, hospital information systems, and GIS systems for government organisations. 

APIS IT uses FlashArray//X and FlashArray//C for general data storage, FlashArray//E for an active data repository, and FlashBlade//S to support real-time analytics. Some of the biggest users of these analytics capabilities are local municipalities who are developing smart city applications utilising IoT sensors. 

“With Pure Storage, we can provision new cloud services in as little as 45 minutes which includes consulting of SSC architects. Previously, this would have taken days,” says Gorseta. 

The team also plans to use Portworx by Pure Storage and Portworx Data services in its Kubernetes environment to support cloud-native application development with a goal of increasing development flexibility for government agencies.

APIS IT understands the importance of protecting highly sensitive public data. Working with Pure Storage allows the team to recover quickly in the event of a ransomware attack. 

“Data protection and disaster recovery are the most important elements of our infrastructure layer. Pure Storage gives us the assurance of synchronous data replication with ActiveCluster and integration with VMware stretched cluster. In addition, its fully automated disaster recovery capability means that we can switch all workloads and systems to an available data centre in less than a minute if needed,” says Gorseta. 

Sustainability was also a critical consideration for the cloud transformation project. With Pure Storage, APIS IT improves energy efficiency with three petabytes of storage contained within six rack units (6U), compared with the three full rack units required for legacy storage. This leads to substantial reductions in power consumption, cooling requirements, and data centre space.

As the government cloud continues to evolve, there are plans to extend the use of analytics, which relies on a very large data lake, as well as deploy AI applications. This will require significant amounts of additional data storage. Pure Storage appears to be up to the task.