Panzura for Public Sector and Government Organizations

As data volumes escalate and data islands proliferate across the organization, the need for a complete data management approach becomes more pressing.

For many organizations though, data is being produced so quickly that simply storing it all is straining resources. Making copies of that data – for backup, redundancy, and offsite storage to meet internal and external mandates can 5x the original data volume. The pressure on IT teams to manage these enormous and sensitive data loads, and on finance teams to budget for storage, is immense.

Maintaining regulatory compliance and protecting all data from exposure in the face of increasing cyber threats adds yet another layer of complexity.

Control Storage Costs While Improving Security

• Consolidate data into a single view across the organization
• Reduce data volumes by removing redundant, duplicated data blocks
• Move workloads to the cloud without compromising performance
• Keep data encrypted and compliant with FIPS 140-2 certification
• Protect data against damage and deletion with ransomware resilience

Regardless of whether you choose to move to approved cloud storage or create a private cloud using on-premises object storage, securing, protecting and distributing data to the users who need it, all requires data management.

In this solution brief, we’ll outline how Panzura helps public sector organizations solve immediate data problems with a cloud data management solution that will support them into the future.

Consolidating Distributed Data

Data distributed across multiple storage devices, and often across multiple locations, is prone to a significant amount of duplication as similar and sometimes almost identical files occupy storage space. Myriad similar copies of the same file cause confusion among users about which version they should rely on as the authoritative copy, making compliance difficult.

While cloud storage presents with a cost-effective pricing structure, simply lifting and shifting that data into the cloud replaces one set of data islands with another. Performance problems working with cloud-stored data, coupled with storage inefficiencies and lack of visibility can quickly render a cloud move ineffective.

Panzura’s global file system, CloudFS, consolidates distributed data into a single, authoritative data set that is visible, and accessible, across the organization.

The use of Panzura by the Executive Office of the U.S. Attorneys exemplifies the push to move mission-critical applications and data to the cloud to avoid spiraling CapEx, manual IT intervention, and data retrieval delays, while providing encryption features to support a public cloud option with all necessary security compliance.

Minimizing Duplication

CloudFS deduplicates redundant data before moving it to your chosen cloud or object store, allowing you to realize a significant reduction in your overall data footprint. CloudFS maintains this globally deduplicated data set at all times, checking for redundancies every time it moves data into your cloud storage.

Accessing Data in Real Time

With CloudFS, all users in your organization work from the authoritative data set stored in your cloud or object store. No changes in workflows, or user behaviors are required – users interact with files in the same way they always have, and CloudFS provides them with a local-feeling file experience. That means that files open and save as quickly as they always did when stored locally.

Maintaining File Consistency

CloudFS makes file edits immediately visible everywhere, as soon as they are saved. This real time file consistency, across every location in the global file network, means that users can rely on opening the authoritative file, complete with any changes, at all times.

Empowering Collaboration

For workloads that require people to work together on the same files, without running over the top of each other, CloudFS empowers collaboration in a way nobody else can. Instantaneous, automatic file locking locks down a file for editing the moment it’s opened. Where applications support element or byte-range locking, such as Microsoft Excel, CloudFS allows multiple users to work within the same file, without overwriting each other.

Keeping Data Protected

CloudFS provides built-in protection against accidental data deletion, or damage caused by malware or ransomware attacks, with a resilient data architecture. Data managed by CloudFS is stored in an immutable – Write Once, Read Many – format so that once it’s in your object storage, it cannot be changed. New data created by file edits or new file creation are stored as new data blocks. No data is ever overwritten.

Restoring Damaged or Lost Data

Read-only system snapshots are taken on a scheduled basis, and these record the file system at that point in time. Additionally, snapshots are taken at every location in the CloudFS every 60 seconds. These provide the ability to restore any file to any point in time as required.

In the event of any file damage – whether caused accidentally or as part of a wider encryption attack such as a ransomware event – individual files, folders or the entire file system can be restored to a pristine state with no data loss, and minimal disruption.

Ensuring Data Compliance

Streamlining data management through intelligent deduplication and the introduction of a single authoritative data source allows IT teams to more easily control where data is stored, who has access, and to monitor that access. FIPS 140-2 certification ensures data is securely encrypted in flight and at rest, making it unable to be read, in the event that it is intercepted.

Secure Erasure

Secure and complete document erasure is made possible through CloudFS Secure Erase and is the digital equivalent of destroying the actual disk on which files are stored. Secure Erase is able to delete all traces of legal records stored in the cloud and follows the guidelines for media sanitization as set out in the Special Publication 800-88 of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Empowering High Availability

CloudFS meets strict regulatory requirements for highly resilient, highly available file services. Every location in a global file system always has read access to data from every other location. Data is stored securely in the cloud and each location can read that data. In the event of a disaster in one location, every other location already has access to the data for immediate recovery.

Panzura Lets You Work With Your Data, the Way That Works for You

Every part of Panzura’s data management solution has been specifically and intentionally designed to let you manage, protect and work with enormous volumes of sensitive data, to get your job done.