Dept of Water Resources Achieves Data Compliance with AWS Storage and Backup Services

The California Department of Water Resources, is part of the California Natural Resources Agency. The Department of Water Resources is responsible for the State of California’s management and regulation of water usage.

Like most state agencies, the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) is subject to government policies that require them to retain their data for a set amount of time. Compliance with these retention policies was increasing digital volume levels for DWR, and the on-premise storage solution that was in place was beginning to reach capacity. There was 500TB of data that was being accessed infrequently, but needed to be securely stored. As any organization that retains large volumes of data knows, investing in additional physical structure to store this and incoming data would have been a costly investment that continue to grow over time. There was a concern for the overall costs of following this path.

Project Needs:

• Reduce on-premise data footprint
• Provide confidence and proof of ability to meet compliance requirements now and over time
• Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and eliminate dependency on third party hardware

California Department of Water Resources (DWR) chose InterVision to provide cloud consulting services to determine the best solution for their needs. After assessing DWR’s current environment, it was found that in addition to basic storage needs, DWR could utilize a solution to back-up their infrastructure to the cloud and then then leverage their current storage solution for other data needs.

The proposed solution was an Integration with AWS Cloud Service (Backup/Restore) that leveraged a hyper converged platform, eliminating the dependencies on third party hardware, and reducing total cost of ownership. AWS Simple Storage Solution (S3) and Glacier were utilized to both house the infrequently accessed data to comply with government retention requirements and as DWR’s new secure backup solution.

By integrating with AWS using InterVision’s Cloud Migration Lifecycle Assurance (CMLA) program, DWR was able to securely house current government data and increase capacity for future data without financially investing in additional physical structures leading to an overall lower spend.