The State of California Governor’s Office acts as the executive branch for the state, directing state agencies and departments, such as the cabinet, legislative, legal, and communications offices. The state’s leader, which is currently Governor Gavin Newsom, changes every four to eight years, directly impacting how the state runs IT and manages data.
Data generated and managed by the Governor’s Office only lives as long as that particular governor is in office. Once the term ends – every four to eight years – IT has to move data generated during the term into the state archives, where it lives under lock and key for 50 years.
Dependence on on-premises IT infrastructure over decades had created quite the carbon footprint. During Arnold Schwarzenegger’s administration (2003-2011), the demand for on-premises infrastructure became so large that IT had to expand its data centers to accommodate more servers and people.
When it came time for a hardware refresh, which aligns with the administration’s tenure, the Governor’s Office IT team decided to reduce a room of nearly 50 physical servers to about five VMware virtual machines (VMs). This journey to the cloud was extended when Governor Newsom took office in 2019, with a goal of enabling a highly mobile workforce.
Government embraces cloud computing and SaaS
With IT under an executive mandate to deliver agility and protect data center and end-user workloads by leveraging the cloud, they had to modernize. To shift CapEx to OpEx, IT decided to launch a hybrid-cloud approach with VMware Cloud (VMC) on Dell EMC on-premises, and adopted Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Box.
While its previous data protection solutions helped facilitate disaster recovery (DR), it was on-premises. The new cloud strategy demanded off-site backups in the cloud, and the Druva Cloud Platform was ideal.
Delivered as-a-service and built on AWS, the Druva Cloud Platform is infinitely scalable and on-demand to meet business needs.
Leaving on-premises infrastructure, hardware refresh cycles and software maintenance behind
The Druva Cloud Platform provides the cloud-native architecture for VMs and SaaS applications, with support for VMC on Dell EMC. Some of the differentiating capabilities were the fact that the Druva Cloud Platform requires no hardware and provides elastic scale, allowing the team to instantly increase or decrease capabilities and consume as required.
“The Druva Cloud Platform gives my team a single pane of glass through which to manage data in Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and the SQL databases running on VMs. Another differentiator is Druva’s ability to connect with Exterro for eDiscovery and FireEye,” said Chris Brode, ISO, network and system administrator for the Office of Governor Newsom.
Chris’ team has the ability to scale up and down as required. “With the Druva Cloud Platform, I don’t have to worry about moving hardware around to support new environments. As we scale, we only need to spin up proxies and back up that environment. The elasticity is exactly what we needed. We’ve been able to reduce the time spent managing backups by 50 to 75%,” he added.
Reduced TCO and other benefits
Read the State of California Governor’s Office case study to learn more from Chris Brode, such as how his team is reducing TCO via a 10.5X global deduplication achieved with Druva, and a 50-75% reduction in time and resources required to manage backups.
“Druva’s built-in global deduplication, which is delivering a 10.5X reduction in storage for our hybrid cloud data, is helping us reduce our TCO,” said Chris.