Helping Government Entities Turn Data Into Action

State and local governments are quickly outgrowing legacy data storage and architecture. Because data is at the heart of decision-making, a sound data strategy and infrastructure are essential to better leverage data assets and execute data management improvements. Many organizations rely on inflexible data-service platforms that were built over time and are fragmented as a result.

When states, cities, and counties can effectively mine vast troves of data, they can more quickly draw insights, make more timely and informed decisions, and deliver improved citizen services. 

Pure Storage® helps you put data into action while reducing the complexity and expense of managing the infrastructure behind it, creating the springboard to a modern, intelligence-driven government.

Pure empowers state and local government departments and agencies to transform operations to an automated, storage as-a-service model seamlessly across multiple clouds. Having the right data strategy helps you overcome such  challenges as:

• Providing quality citizen services on tight budgets
• Enabling on-demand, rapid access to data
• Managing the shift to cloud-like operations and consumption
• Ensuring data privacy, protection, and security
• Maintaining business continuity
• Addressing gaps in skills and staffing for strategic initiatives

As governments seek to embrace more business-like efficiencies,  IT modernization is at the center. You can gain more value from your data assets, optimize workloads across cloud and on-premises deployments, leverage technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) at scale, and protect and secure your data.

To achieve your agency’s mission objectives, you need a scalable, secure, and future-proof IT foundation to leverage data as a strategic asset. 

Pure’s end-to-end product suite enables storage teams to deliver elastic block, file, and object data services to power multicloud environments. It’s a consolidated, shared platform for data that is purpose-built to drive both traditional and new stack modes of IT, with the speed and agility to simplify workflows, empower developers, and deliver next-gen AI and analytics.

In addition, Pure’s cloud data services, infrastructure, and management extend the Modern Data Experience™ across all your assets, both on-premises and in the public cloud. Our transformative solutions make data fast, shared, and on-demand; reliable and secure; and hybrid by design. We enable true hybrid operations so you can build your cloud, run applications anywhere, and protect data everywhere.

State and local governments are experiencing increasing strain on their IT systems. Unexpected events can lead to urgent and sometimes unplanned new storage requirements. These requirements are often necessary to perform mission-critical functions and operations while ensuring that vital services remain available to constituents.

Pure as-a-Service is a simple and quick way to implement new on-premises and hybrid cloud all-flash storage without committing to a multi-year CAPEX purchase.

Ransomware attacks and the risk of compromised data are increasingly top of mind for state and local government IT leaders. 

For example, the City of New Orleans faced a brutal cyberattack. Within hours, city servers and computers were shut down to mitigate damage, and the city declared a state of emergency. Not knowing how far the attack had gone, they had to assume the worst. They proceeded to test, cleanse, and store all their data elsewhere to prevent further attacks. This required a new IT infrastructure and twice as much storage. But it also provided an opportunity to update a legacy, underperforming storage platform. City leaders decided to replace the entire storage footprint with Pure Storage. Within days, the city had new equipment on site and began migrating data.

Consequences of ransomware attacks can be dire. You pay perpetrators to (maybe) unencrypt your data, stumble with decryption tools, or gamble on recovering from backups. With millions of dollars spent annually to guard entry points to data, many still underestimate the strategic value of augmenting data protection. The risks include:

• Data privacy and security breaches
• Public safety assurance and response
• Inability to deliver critical services
• Exposure and loss of sensitive data
• Lack of access to vital information
• Financial and productivity losses
• Damage to trust and reputation

Existing data protection may not be enough. Backup solutions safeguard critical data against natural or man-made disasters, data corruption, or accidental deletions. However, ransomware attacks can overtax existing data-protection infrastructure built on legacy architectures, such as disk and tape, beyond repair.

Pure has introduced an approach to mitigating against these attacks when using Pure FlashBlade® systems. SafeMode™ snapshots, a built-in FlashBlade feature, enable you to create read-only snapshots of backup data and associated metadata catalogs after you’ve performed a full backup. You can recover data directly from these snapshots, guarding against attacks by ransomware and even rogue admins. FlashBlade provides the following benefits:

• Enhanced protection: Ransomware can’t delete, modify, or encrypt SafeMode™ snapshots.
• Backup integration: Apply the same snapshot process regardless of backup product or native utility used to manage data protection processes.
• Flexibility: Snapshot cadence and eradication scheduling are customizable.
• Rapid data restore: Leverage a massively parallel architecture and elastic performance that scales with data to speed backup and moreover recovery.
• Investment protection: FlashBlade includes SafeMode™ snapshots at no extra charge. Your Pure subscription or maintenance support contract cover enhancements.

Evergreen™ Storage subscriptions deliver value to your organization, providing storage that is deployed once and stays modern with seamless hardware and software upgrades and built-in compatibility with future technologies. 

As your company grows, you can scale storage as needed—without downtime, performance impact, data migrations, expensive leases, or forklift upgrades. Get IDC’s report on the value of Evergreen.

As state and local governments modernize their IT operations, they are evaluating IT solutions, activating new storage systems, and innovating everywhere they can.

Pure Professional Services deliver the simplicity of Pure solutions faster, easier, and with more impact. Pure dedicates a team of experts to maintain 99.9999%* uptime. This reduces risk when migrating technologies. And when we work with you, the synergies and insights gained make it possible to lower costs, add new services, and transform quickly.

For the seventh year in a row, Pure Storage is a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, affirming the value of cloud-era flash technology to the public sector and solidifying Pure’s position as the leading independent all-flash data platform vendor. 

For years, the complexities and high costs of legacy data storage have been accepted as inevitable. With Pure, those days are over ^* . Pure is more efficient, cost effective, reliable, and flat-out easier to use, with downtime a thing of the past. 

Pure’s solutions are proven at more than 400 state and local government organizations. With a certified customer satisfaction score in the top one percent, Pure is working hard to please existing users and win over new ones.

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