This morning we announced that the City of South Portland has used Actifio PAS to completely eliminate their reliance on legacy backup software. As if helping one of the largest cities in the State of Maine to break free from the tyranny of brute force data backup methods isn’t cool enough, we’re equally excited about some of the other, less obvious benefits the city achieved through IT modernization.
When making IT decisions, we look at a variety of success criteria like Financial Impact, Operational Impact and Business Impact. For S. Portland, completely eliminating their backup software and associated backup and restore windows, while implementing data replication for disaster recovery was no doubt a huge impact. But when we change our orientation to why our technology decisions really matter and focus on the Civic or Societal Impact, some really interesting observations can be made.
For Shawn Pennington, S. Portland’s Director of IT, the Societal Impact of simplifying data management with Actifio is all about enabling his IT team to recover any type of data instantly to fulfill Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests – faster and easier than ever before. Under the law, anyone can request information on any topic and the city must be able to recover the documents associated with that request.
For even the most modern, well staffed, finely tuned enterprise data centers, responding to requests like those required by FOIA would cause a panic and a massive OPEX/CAPEX spend. You’d have to first find the data and once you’ve located it (in a cave, on a tape in the closet, dehydrated in a dedupe appliance somewhere) you then need to transform it back into an application ready format before getting the data back to the requestor.
We’re talking hours, days and weeks and not minutes with typical legacy point tools.
This is simply unacceptable, especially in a world where consumers are used to the always-on access models made popular by cloud based services like Facebook and iTunes. Users require immediate, instant access to their data. For local, state and federal institutions providing this type of access is simply too expensive, however large the potential civil or societal impact. It’s exciting to see the City of South Portland join the community of more than 100 Actifio users who are sticking it to the status quo…breaking free of the legacy approach to data management to provide anything, instantly for 90% less than they could before.
So we’re excited to have South Portland’s back. We might have yours this summer if you make a Freedom of Information Act request.
Related articles
- Actifio Announces PAS 5.0, Radically Simple Copy Data Management (sys-con.com)
- An Alphabet Soup of Data (actifio.com)
- Netwave Corporation Selects Actifio for Self-Service Cloud Data Management Solution (actifio.com)
- Actifio Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) Enables WattMaster Controls to Reverse Data Explosion and Eliminate Backup Software (actifio.com)
