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Protecting citizen data with robust, reliable storage
Facing up to evolving cyberthreats
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.”
Helping to enhance performance and boost efficiency
Moving to IBM Storage DS8910F arrays has helped to deliver an uptick in storage performance. “We already had fast response times,” explains Rose. “However, the new flash storage takes things to the next level. Ultimately, this helps us to provide quick backup, recovery and restoration whenever we need it.”
So far, the ITA has put the Safeguarded Copy capability in IBM Spectrum Virtualize through its paces in test environments—with excellent results. Rose explains: “We ran a test scenario with EMET Barmor and found we can recover production data in less than 15 minutes using Safeguarded Copy. Restoring fast means that we have the opportunity to minimize downtime if our core systems go offline—whether that’s due to a cyberattack or a technical issue.”
Upgrading to IBM FlashSystem® storage has also helped the ITA reduce energy and data center cooling costs, while providing more storage capacity without increasing the data center footprint. Rose concludes: “With IBM and EMET Barmor, we are in a stronger position to support growing transaction volumes while defending against cyberthreats.”
The Israel Tax Authority (ITA) (link resides outside of ibm.com) manages the collection of a wide range of taxes throughout Israel—including income, payroll, real estate tax and extraordinary levies. With over 5,700 employees, the ITA runs 26 regional assessment offices, 4 regional investigation units, 3 regional collection enforcement units and a national intelligence unit.
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