Storage as a Service (STaaS) is gaining traction within the Department of Defense and attracting interest from civilian agencies because it affords greater agility in responding to their missions.
DOD has the resources readily available to invest in handing day-to-day storage operations over to an industry partner, leaving its IT teams to more strategically address end-user issues, but there’s opportunity among cash-strapped civilian agencies as well.
STaaS lets an agency subscribe to only the storage it needs, when it needs it, while the provider maintains ownership of the necessary on-premises equipment and cloud resources. That means no big payment up front and manageable monthly or annual fees, depending on the contract structure, based on what the agency anticipates it will use.
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Rightsizing Storage From the Start
More than defense agencies, civilian agencies’ budgets fluctuate annually, and there may be surprises once approved by Congress and the president. For this reason, reaching an agreement is usually the toughest part of the STaaS model.
Typically, STaaS contracts run for three years with annual payments, with the second and third years optional for agency flexibility.
Agency IT leaders should approach STaaS contracts with the mindset of rightsizing storage up front by estimating what their peak performance will be within the current budget cycle. While costs are adjusted if agencies use more compute than storage, this will minimize financial discomfort.
The good news is once the initial agreement is reached, it serves as a blueprint for future contracts with that agency and any of its components, and upgrade discounts are prescribed.
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Storage Tailored to Your Desired IT Environment
STaaS’s benefits start with migrating agencies off their own, aging storage equipment. There is an agency that currently buys hard drives from the web to expand its storage because it lacks the funds for next-generation equipment.
It doesn’t have to be that way. CDW Government partners with both Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Pure Storage, both of which are experienced at significantly reducing agency downtime.
The partner handles all of the minutia of the agency’s desired IT environment — migrating workloads, firmware and software upgrades, and security patches — under the subscription fee. Their experience makes them more efficient at all of these things.
In the past, security was a challenge for agencies because they had to rely on a public cloud, but now storage can be on-premises, in an air-gapped environment that they or their partner designates, or in a government cloud such as Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services’. Agencies have more storage options than ever with STaaS.
This article is part of FedTech’s CapITal blog series.
