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Data resilience for modern government services

APIS IT  - An IBM case study

5 Minutes for fast database backups
1,000+ virtual machines and containerized projects protected

Like most organizations today, APIS IT needed to do more with less — achieve more flexible, modern services that provide greater flexibility and speed within budget. The biggest challenge to its plan is the nature of its business. The company’s applications are highly dynamic, and therefore classic backup processes are not applicable to its new containerized environment. Its legacy infrastructure was holding it back.

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About APIS IT

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The central IT agency for the Croatian government, APIS IT, delivers IT support for critical government entities such as the tax system, the customs system and all elections.

The state-owned company is the cloud provider to the government and the largest infrastructure service provider. To maintain this position and ensure further growth, APIS IT needed to modernize its infrastructure to increase resiliency, streamline operations and ensure applications are safe and protected. The company’s IT modernization plan included developing and containerizing everything on the Red Hat® OpenShift® platform and protecting it with data resilience and data access capabilities.

Like most organizations today, APIS IT needed to do more with less — achieve more flexible, modern services that provide greater flexibility and speed within budget. The biggest challenge to its plan is the nature of its business. The company’s applications are highly dynamic, and therefore classic backup processes are not applicable to its new containerized environment. Its legacy infrastructure was holding it back.

The Problem

"One of the major challenges was the dynamic nature of our applications – we needed technology to back up databases, configurations and other resources using Kubernetes."

"Implementation was straightforward and simplified our processes. Now we simply run a database inside OpenShift, connect applications to it, set policies inside Spectrum Protect Plus, then start backing up."

Jasmin Strkonjic Head of Distributed Systems, APIS IT
How IBM Helped

Streamlined backup and recovery for service continuity

The new infrastructure at APIS IT streamlines the process of re-creating applications from a backup, providing data resilience for continuity of business and IT services. It enables cross-team collaboration, with different micro teams managing components of the environment and working together to achieve their business goals. APIS IT is also now benefitting from security by design for every containerized application that it deploys, from an infrastructure perspective. This allows APIS IT to consistently apply security policies across the entire OpenShift ecosystem, protecting it from ransomware and malware.

The greatest benefit for APIS IT is that IBM Spectrum Protect Plus only backs up the snapshot persistent volume without affecting the running persistent volume. As a result, it provides data resilience without interfering with the production workload.

“The resulting efficiency will allow APIS IT to run more diverse workloads in greater volumes. It will also allow APIS IT to migrate some of our customers’ legacy applications to newer, modern applications,” says Jasmin Strkonjic, Head of Distributed Systems at APIS IT. “All government entities, ministries and offices from local to larger are trying to digitize their work. Croatia is trying to make more digital platforms for our citizens — this environment will be instrumental in helping us achieve this.”

To further simplify the solution, all storage is managed from the OpenShift console. Adding databases is straightforward and takes only a few minutes.

“The combined solution of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus and OpenShift is the only enterprise solution that offers both snapshots and real backups for resilient containerized environments and is also very easy to implement in production. If you have very important data to back up, this is the only solution available.”

Jasmin Strkonjic Head of Distributed Systems, APIS IT

The Outcome

The combined solution of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus and OpenShift created both snapshots for resilient containerized environments, without affecting the production workload. Simplifying operations resulted in a refocus to deliver high-value outcomes and focus on creating more digital platforms. 

-        Straightforward implementation 

-        Functionality to design a new, modern application infrastructure 

-        Easy integration with current systems 

-       Simplified platform management 

-       Malware and ransomware protection 

-       Ability to run more diverse workloads 

-       Creating more digital platforms faster 

Instrumental to the smooth transition was the low risk to business operations. This outcome was achieved using IBM's Spectrum Protect Plus in combination with the OpenShift container platform. 

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