On-Demand Storage Is a Game Changer for State and Local Government

Aligning Storage With Tight Budgets

State and local governments are among the most budget-conscious organizations. Revenues can be somewhat unpredictable, federal aid comes and goes, and IT teams are often asked to do more with less. On-demand storage allows agencies to rightsize their environments and avoid paying upfront for capacity they won’t need for years, if ever.

Here’s how it works: Solution architects sit down with IT leaders to assess current storage needs and anticipate growth areas. From there, they build a pricing model that links usage directly to budget. That means instead of guessing what costs might look like, governments can plan with a higher degree of confidence, knowing what their price per gigabyte will be today and in the future.

This is especially valuable as municipalities grapple with data-heavy initiatives such as police cameras, traffic systems and public safety surveillance. With on-demand storage, agencies don’t need to buy five years’ worth of storage upfront. They can pay for exactly what they use while having predictable costs going forward.

EXPLORE: State and local governments can navigate budget uncertainties with IT modernization.

Freeing Up Resources for Mission-Critical Projects

Another major benefit of the Storage as a Service model is that it shifts the day-to-day burden of monitoring and maintaining storage infrastructure. Instead of assigning staff to keep the lights on and track blinking server indicators, agencies can reassign those employees to more impactful projects.

Some municipalities also leverage bill-back features, which make it possible to track usage by department. This is valuable for jurisdictions embracing cooperative purchasing. For example, the police department might consume a different number of resources than the public works department and can pay according to that use. This ensures IT budgets don’t get drained covering everyone else’s storage consumption.

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Flexibility and Visibility Across Hybrid Environments

One of the biggest questions governments have is how on-demand storage fits into hybrid IT environments. Many state and local jurisdictions use a mix of on-premises systems, colocation sites and public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

On-demand storage is designed with flexibility in mind. Agencies can choose whether equipment lives on-premises, in a hosted facility or a mix of both. They can even define the hardware environment, which isn’t something public cloud providers typically accommodate. This means governments can meet strict regulatory requirements while still benefiting from the efficiency of consumption-based pricing.

Visibility is another key factor. Vendors such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise have made significant strides toward single-pane-of-glass management tools that let agencies oversee both public and private cloud environments from one interface. That means IT teams can move workloads between environments based on cost, compliance and performance requirements, all while having clear visibility into where data lives and how much it costs to store.

DIVE DEEPER: Learn more about hybrid cloud storage best practices.

Moving Beyond Storage: A Flexible IT Future

While storage is a natural starting point, many vendors and partners also offer computing, networking, backup, disaster recovery and even security as services. Governments can build entire IT environments on a consumption model, paying only for what they use and scaling as needs grow.

That said, the traditional capital expenditure model feels familiar and safe for many IT leaders, and in some cases, is favored out of necessity based on how budgets are approved.

Transitioning to service-based approach requires a mindset shift. At CDW, we can work closely with our partners such as HPE and Dell Apex to educate state and local agencies and show them not just cost savings but a roadmap to long-term efficiencies. We can forecast with a high degree of accuracy what year one looks like, how budgets shift in year three and where the real efficiencies emerge.

At the end of the day, agencies aren’t looking for storage in a vacuum; they’re looking for solutions that let them stretch dollars further, meet compliance needs and deliver services more effectively. On-demand storage, and the broader service-based model, offers a way to do just that.

This article is part of StateTech’s CITizen blog series.