Storage That Protects the Data of Alicante Citizens

In 2024, 34% of ransomware attacks in Spain were directed at public authorities, according to the National Cryptological Center. When Suma Gestión Tributaria decided to migrate its storage to an all-flash environment, it chose Pure Storage® for both its performance and its cyber resilience.

Suma Gestión Tributaria is the tax collection and management agency for the Provincial Council of Alicante (Spain), handling the taxes of 2 million taxpayers. The agency has two data centers servicing 47 tax offices, as well as a virtual office providing services 24 hours a day. Whether requesting information or making payments, citizens expect a prompt response.

Given that this organization supports critical operations, its storage platform had to be capable of supporting 24-hour service, but its traditional disk systems no longer met growing requirements. As Julio Ballesta, Head of Operations at Suma Gestión Tributaria, explains, “We decided to change because support for the solution was ending, and we were running out of available space. Also, the previous system required us to perform certain tasks in an excessively manual manner.” 

These manual tasks included synchronizing storage in its two data centers, which have both active-active and active-passive high-availability clusters. The process could take up to 18 hours, forcing IT staff to synchronize data over the weekend to minimize service interruptions, but leaving new data unsynchronized for as much as a week—a critical issue.

SUMA decided to migrate to an all-flash platform with high performance for batch processing of large volumes of data, excellent operational continuity, robust security against ransomware attacks, and sufficient storage capacity for the foreseeable future.

After evaluating different options, Suma Gestión Tributaria chose Pure Storage FlashArray//X™ as its main storage to support its Oracle databases for tax management and collection on behalf of taxpayers, and VMware virtual servers to run applications and provide system services. This approach reduced the costs of licenses and maintenance resources, generating significant savings for the organization. 

“In comparison with our previous supplier, Pure Storage makes storage management of virtualized servers much simpler and more cost-effective, freeing up resources for our organization,” says Ballesta.

Suma Gestión Tributaria subsequently added the Pure Storage FlashArray//C™ platform to migrate its backup system, driven by Veeam. By exploiting the powerful deduplication and compression capabilities of the Pure Storage platform, the agency expects this solution to meet its backup requirements for the next three to five years.

The migration to Pure Storage was straightforward, rapid and transparent. Lynx View, the partner responsible for deployment, played a key role in project design, transition management, and advising technical personnel to help get off to the best possible start. 80% of the SUMA environment was migrated in less than two days, and the whole environment was migrated transparently in less than a week.

“Working with Pure Storage gave us confidence that our migration would be successful, and Lynx View proved to be a reliable partner who simplified the project and gave excellent advice, which resulted in a very successful migration,” says Ballesta.

“When we migrated to Pure, we were looking for various benefits: continuity, performance, simplicity, and security. Our users noticed a clear improvement with Pure Storage,” says Ballesta.

The SUMA team is seeing faster responses in transaction processes for its tax management application, which allows them to quickly respond to tax queries and perform needed actions, providing better service to the public. The organization is saving even more time in its most important processes. Very large system processes that previously took several hours now take only a fraction of the time, resulting in an average time saving of more than 70%.

The Pure Storage platform also offers much greater data availability, without service interruptions. The IT team no longer needs to sacrifice its weekends to synchronize data storage or manually manage it, or even update it to the latest functionality, improving staff efficiency and freeing up time to concentrate on improving infrastructure performance. The automatic fault switches, rapid recovery, and Pure Storage SafeMode™ immutable and unalterable snapshots keep systems online.

“Pure Storage SafeMode snapshots give us peace of mind that we can quickly recover our data and keep the information private in the event of a ransomware attack. This means our information system managers can sleep more peacefully at night,” says Ballesta.

In addition, the Evergreen® scalable architecture and subscription model for the Pure Storage platform facilitate upgrades and expansions without downtime, disruptions or financial impact, which gives Suma Gestión Tributaria confidence in its ability to fulfill growing storage requirements. “For a public institution, investment in technology has to be successful. We can’t risk public money on solutions that don’t deliver the expected results,” says Ballesta. “Pure Storage gives us confidence that we made the right decision for our organization and our citizens.”