Discover how the State of California Natural Resources Agency has reduced cost, decreased storage footprint and increased storage space with NetApp storage. http://nt-ap.com/1ncbONm
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State of California: Government Cloud
1. Executive Summary
State of California:
Government Cloud
Operating at the Speed of Citizens
With the world’s eighth-largest economy and a diverse population of more than
38 million people, California is more like a small country than a state. Management
of California’s precious resources—from its coastlines to its parks, fish, wildlife,
energy sources, and water—is a responsibility that impacts not only the people
of California, but people around the world.
Tasked with that responsibility are the 29 organizations within the California Natural
Resources Agency (CNRA), which depend on real-time data access to make informed
decisions and respond quickly to disasters such as flood, fire, drought, and earthquakes.
“The goal of our IT organization is to provide timely information and services to our
departments so that they can operate at the speed of the citizens,” explains Tim
Garza, IT director for California Natural Resources Agency.
In 2008, budget shortfalls brought the state to a critical inflection point. With
30% annual data growth and an ever-increasing demand for information, the
CNRA could no longer afford to support business as usual.
“We were in dire straits,” says Garza. “There was no funding to support information
technology efforts that would enable our business areas to function effectively, let
alone improve and innovate.”
As agencies throughout the state grappled with the financial crisis, California State
CIO Carlos Ramos proposed a visionary strategy to meet growing demand with
fewer resources through shared IT services. The diversity of needs across the
organizations of CNRA made the agency the perfect organization to realize
Ramos’s vision. Together, Garza and his team led the California Natural Resources
Agency’s transformation, bringing the agency’s IT organizations together with an
internal private cloud solution built on industry technologies that utilized NetApp®
storage to provide shared services and information.
“Without a fundamental change in our service architecture, we would have been
out of the game,” says Garza. “NetApp provided the multi-tenant, shared services
storage infrastructure and functions to support the increased data demands on
resources within our agency.” Continued
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Storage Footprint
30%
Decrease
State of California Sets New Standards
for Secure Cloud Services in Government
Across 29 Agencies
35%
Cost Reduction
Storage Space
300%
Increase
A New Standard for
Government IT
For Garza, deploying the state’s first
private cloud infrastructure was the easy
part. Uniting 29 disparate departments
to entrust their data storage needs and
services to the CNRA organization and
pursue a new strategy would require
nothing short of a cultural revolution.
Prior to 2008, each department in the
CNRA was responsible for its own
IT infrastructure, resulting in “islands”
of data locked away on disparate and
siloed systems.
“We decided not to force other depart-
ments into joining the CNRA private
cloud,” says Garza. “We wanted to
build our infrastructure in such a way that
they would want to join, because it made
good business sense. Thanks to the joint
leadership of the agency departments’
CIOs, that has happened.”
To create an IT infrastructure that
other organizations would want to join,
Garza implemented what he calls the
“Three-C Approach”: Continued
“The goal of our IT organization
is to provide timely information
and services to our departments
so that they can operate at the
speed of the citizens.”
Tim Garza
IT Director
California Natural Resources Agency