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Anything is Possible with the Right Data Foundation

Data Storage • IT Modernization  |  July 19, 2024

Data Is Essential to Supporting Agency Missions

Agency IT stakeholders understand that fully leveraging data can significantly enhance mission delivery, including informed policymaking, real-time information sharing with the warfighter, improved service delivery, and better fraud detection and prevention. According to the recent Federal Data Maturity Report published by MeriTalk, which surveyed 150 federal IT decision-makers, 99% of responders emphasized the importance of leveraging data for decision-making and achieving mission goals over the past year.

Federal agencies face increasing pressure to leverage all their data to drive decision-making and achieve mission goals. Yet, agencies are inundated with so much data that it becomes challenging to fully utilize, access, and share it between systems and stakeholders. Data is streaming in from diverse sources like video feeds, location services, IoT sensors, and machine learning models. The struggle is evident, with less than 1 in 3 Federal IT stakeholders rating their ability to use data-driven insights as an “A” according to the Federal Data Maturity Report published by MeriTalk.

What’s Holding Organizations Back?

Despite the high potential of data, several infrastructure challenges hinder agencies from converting data into actionable insights.  Specifically, the report reveals the primary challenges organizations are up against that are keeping them from fully leveraging their data to drive mission success:

  • 91% face hybrid cloud operational challenges, including data compatibility and downtime issues.
  • 62% are concerned that their infrastructure won’t be able to scale to meet their data needs over the next two years.
  • 57% feel their current data infrastructure is overwhelmed by increasing data volumes.
  • 55% are concerned about detecting data breaches in time to protect data.
  • 52% believe their infrastructure is not agile enough to adapt to evolving technologies.
  • 39% cite interoperability and compatibility issues between different data sources as a bottleneck.

At the top of the agency challenge list is the data volume growth.  However, most of that volume doesn’t come from structured data, the traditional data we’ve primarily seen in the data center.  Instead, the increase in data volume is coming from newer and diverse data types, including machine-generated IoT data, multimedia data, geospatial and location data, and unstructured data.   As a result, it is essential to establish a robust data foundation that spans all system types – block, file, and object. This will effectively decouple data infrastructure from individual data types, addressing the complexity of the data landscape.

Given these challenges, agencies must rethink their data storage and accessibility strategies to optimize storage and streamline operations.

Anything is Possible with the Right Data Foundation

Agencies have high expectations for data storage transformation and future technological advancements—all they need is the right data foundation to make it happen. With secure access to any data from any source at any time, anything is possible. Modern storage infrastructure must address the challenges of storing, protecting, and moving data. For decades, storage infrastructure was optimized to simplify the storage and protection of information.
However, in contemporary environments, this is not enough. Modern storage environments must also simplify the movement and access of data wherever it is required. The reality of data being dispersed across multiple, disparate storage architectures, each with different experiences and considerations, has created a new list of storage challenges that surpass traditional issues of cost, performance, and protection.

With the right data infrastructure, agencies can simplify the complex landscape of data storage, enabling the management of structured and unstructured data across distributed hybrid environments. They can seamlessly operate and optimize applications, whether hosted on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge. Moreover, by leveraging the power of artificial intelligence, agencies can establish an intelligent data fabric capable of accommodating diverse data types within any environment.

The Power of One: Introducing the VSP One Family of Solutions

Investing in a modern data foundation doesn’t need to be complicated. Agencies can achieve all their infrastructure goals in one place with the VSP One Family of Solutions from Hitachi Vantara Federal. The Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) One provides a single data plane across structured and unstructured data, including block, file, and object storage, allowing organizations to run all their applications anywhere—on premises or in the public cloud. As a unified data storage platform, it eliminates silos and the complexities of disparate storage systems, enabling organizations to easily and securely access data needed for business insights.

Hitachi Vantara’s VSP One is designed to transform digital operations, providing consistency and simplicity as organizations manage the explosive growth in data capacity and value. It can be deployed across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, allowing organizations the freedom to store, protect, and use their data wherever required, without the added cost, complexity, and risk created by disparate storage silos. The strategy focuses on dramatically simplifying data infrastructure, allowing agencies to concentrate on data rather than the intricacies of a hybrid environment. Hitachi Vantara is a trusted partner, offering unbreakable data infrastructure with guarantees, ensuring continuous access, capacity optimization, and data immutability and recoverability.

With the VSP One Family of Solutions, agencies can achieve total data freedom. They can consume the right solution at the right time, enable siloed solutions to interact with each other, and govern one platform while applications manage it. This simplifies the complex landscape of data storage, enabling management of structured and unstructured data across distributed hybrid environments. Agencies can seamlessly operate and optimize applications, whether hosted on-premises, in the cloud, or at the edge. By leveraging the power of artificial intelligence, they can establish an intelligent data fabric capable of accommodating diverse data types within any environment.

The VSP One Family of Solutions offers:

  • One Data Fabric: Power apps and data across your infrastructure with a unified data fabric.
  • One Control Plane: Speed time to insight by seamlessly managing your data infrastructure with a single solution.
  • One Data Plane: Enable data to flow easily across your applications, on-prem or in the cloud.

By simplifying and scaling your data with a single, seamless platform, Hitachi Vantara Federal’s VSP One Family of Solutions empowers agencies to meet their data needs and achieve their missions efficiently and effectively.

Conclusion

While there isn’t a single infrastructure solution to address all data infrastructure needs and challenges, the foundation of an effective data infrastructure starts with having the right data platform. Hitachi Vantara’s industry-leading data platform empowers government agencies to leverage data to its fullest potential, ensuring they can confidently achieve their mission goals.

 

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