Page 63 - FCW, May/June 2018

Technology Gives Agencies Control of Data
Software Brings Visibility and Simplicity.
Data management today is not your father’s data management. It’s orders of magnitude more complex, and requires systems and infrastructure that are different in all ways from what was required then. The way the data itself is used, managed and stored has changed completely.
Back in the “legacy days,” data management meant having just some of the data held in live storage for use by various applications, said Mike Wilkerson, executive director of sales engineering
for Rubrik’s Federal group. Everything else was archived on tape, and often moved to another site for safekeeping. It was hardly touched, he said, because the effort it took to pull it back from the data bank and make it ready for use again was complicated and resource intensive.
“Today, we have the technology to keep all of that data near-line,” he said, “and even with archiving, in the cloud there are technologies like Rubrik’s that allow us to operationalize what back then was a sunk capital expense.”
Steve Alfieris, vice president and general manager for the Rubrik Federal group, as well as all the services and the databases associated with them.
to be buying Rubrik’s solutions for their simplicity of operations, Alfieris said.
With this in mind, when agencies think about IT modernization, they have to consider the type and source of the data they manage, what kind of storage they use, and if that data is available in the most cost-effective way. Wilkerson suggests that agencies use specific policies and rules to make sure the data is in the right place for the right users, and “when checking the cloud box, what it’s going to cost to pull that data back. Lots of users miss that when they move to the cloud.”
“A lot of government agencies struggle with identifying the data silos that contain all of the data they have across the organization,” Alfieris said. The President’s Management Agenda may emphasize using data as a strategic asset, but the bottom line is, agencies “don’t have control of their data today.”
“We can take the backup of the most recent production workload and, within minutes, have that stood up and available for testing,” he said. “Once that’s complete, they can go ahead and ensure any patching is done, and then put it out into production.”
Solutions Rubrik offers give a “single pane of glass” visibility into all of the data elements that agencies have, said
Agencies across government — intelligence, defense and civilian — seem
For more information, please visit rubrik.com
“We provide them with the capability to see a catalog of all of that data, and give them access to the data in a simple way
so they can easily leverage it for analysis using technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence,” he said.
Plus, Alfieris added, Rubrik’s technology can leverage the services
that exist in government today, and can also instantiate its software anywhere in the cloud — be that Amazon, Google, Microsoft Azure or others. Any cluster can run in Rubrik’s software.
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