As a core government agency, the Israel Tax Authority (ITA) processes on average 8 million transactions per day—a figure that has increased by 62% in recent years. Whether it represents a business paying its taxes or a citizen filing for a rebate, every transaction is unique, and the ITA maintains extensive records at its data center. This information is essential in helping the government raise the funds it needs to deliver world-class citizen services.

Keenly aware of the growing sophistication of cyberattacks and the significant risk they create, the ITA works constantly to strengthen the security of systems and data at the heart of its operations.

With transaction volumes rising so quickly, the ITA wanted to make the storage infrastructure underpinning its operations sufficiently resilient, stable and scalable. With the ITA’s existing storage systems approaching the end of vendor support, IT leaders saw an opportunity to explore new ways of enhancing cyber resiliency.

To find the right storage platform for the future, the acquisitions department of the Israeli government launched a tender process to gather bids from a range of vendors. After a rigorous evaluation process, the acquisitions team selected a proposal from IBM Business Partner EMET Barmor to replace the ITA’s spinning-disk arrays with new IBM® Storage DS8910F all-flash storage devices.

As well as refreshing the storage hardware, EMET Barmor recommended leveraging the Safeguarded Copy feature of IBM Spectrum® Virtualize to establish air-gapped, immutable copies of the ITA’s transaction data.

“We judged that EMET Barmor and IBM had the technologies that best met our requirements at the best price. For example, IBM Storage offered the shortest RTO [recovery time objective] of all the devices we looked at,” explains Shimon Rose , Department Manager MF Systems at the ITA. “Having worked with EMET Barmor previously, we were confident we could trust in their expertise.”

After working with IBM to install the new storage devices, EMET Barmor helped the ITA to use Safeguarded Copy to create point-in-time copies of production data that can’t be modified or mounted without administrator clearance. “The EMET Barmor consultants worked in a very professional way,” says Rose . “They always responded quickly to our queries, even when we raised support tickets outside of normal business hours.”