How Federal Health and Human Services Agencies Can Simplify and Automate Database Management while Increasing Security Across All Disparate Databases

Federal agencies focused on health and human services have long faced challenges around the capture, management, and analysis of large quantities of data. But the Covid-19 pandemic significantly compounded those worries. Agencies are burdened with the complexity of managing the life cycle of databases, including provisioning of new databases, management of existing databases, and the many 2nd day tasks that come with a database’s life cycle such as back-up and recovery, upgrades, patching, scaling and data management.

The pressure is on. Today you must be nimbler than ever in responding to fast-changing demands for disease surveillance, biomedical research, and population health. At the same time, you must continue to gather and analyze disparate data to drive research, track the spread of diseases, and monitor medical supply chains – all while improving delivery of care and achieving better health outcomes.

In order to address these complexities agencies should consider a new operating model that provides a consistent platform spanning disparate databases and clouds - or a Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) architecture. Here’s how.

Federal agencies should demand a database management solution that delivers cloud-like services that integrates seamlessly with a foundational IT infrastructure. Such a solution should offer several key features:

• Manageable API: An open-sourced platform that provides an API that’s tested, straightforward to manage, and scalable to meet mission-critical workloads can simplify operations, save staff time, and reduce total cost of ownership.
• Abstraction: An abstraction layer above your existing heterogeneous database technology that alleviates any worries about how disparate databases interact with your infrastructure.
• Foundation: The right solution that enables you to provision, manage, and optimize database operations, saving time on routine tasks so DBAs can focus on strategic initiatives for mission needs.
• Simplification: Simplified database operations that lets you spin up any database – Oracle, MySQL, SAP HANA and others – whenever you need it. You can also easily scale up compute and storage, and just as quickly shut it all down when they’re no longer needed.
• Centralization: A single management plane across all your databases, no matter what kind and how many you manage, that allows you to quickly get a backup snapshot of an Oracle database the same way you’d get one for a MySQL database, for instance.

The right database and infrastructure solution can empower your organization to simplify database management – by automating database tasks in transparent ways that gives you the benefits of automation while retaining control over your OS and your database versions and customizations. Additional results should include:

• Better agility and security: Many federal health databases aren’t practical to move to a public cloud because of their size or security requirements. But an effective solution can enable you to realize the ease and nimbleness of public cloud on-prem.
• Improved productivity: Automation enables you to simplify routine tasks, like getting access to compute and storage, to reduce provisioning time from days to hours or even minutes. Versioning built into database profiles makes it simple to roll out updates and patches. DBAs are freed from busywork to focus on mission-supporting innovations.
• Greater operational efficiency: You can deploy infrastructure databases in minutes, accelerate development and testing deployment by up to 10 times, and improve performance by up to three times. You can manage data through repeatable processes that encapsulate DBA knowledge to manage database environments automatically with just a few clicks. And because backup and restore, for example, is identical among all databases, you can improve data resilience.
• Scalability for big data analytics: Health agencies manage large data quantities. An effective solution delivers web-scale capabilities, with an underlying infrastructure that provides fast access to storage so you can analyze data quickly and respond to changing needs.

Finally, by combining database management and infrastructure, you can implement an as-a-service approach to data. No matter how many database engines you run, you can manage them centrally through one control plane. No matter the size of your datastores, you can quickly and easily access compute and storage as you provision new databases. All the pieces are automatically integrated for simplified database management.

Nutanix Cloud Platform with Nutanix Era checks every box for the ideal solution for simplified, secure and effective database management for disparate database environments, delivering DBaaS (Database -As-A-Service) on your terms, under your control. Nutanix AHV is a secure, enterprise-grade and license-free infrastructure virtualization solution. Nutanix Era delivers unified database operations for any private, public or hybrid cloud.

Together, these innovative solutions can empower your organization to modernize and simplify your underlying infrastructure and manage the databases and data that are vital to your mission-critical applications and analytics. You gain the capabilities you need to meet today’s demands: operate with greater agility, implement new innovations, and achieve better outcomes for your constituencies.

• Simplified Storage Scaling: Nutanix Era manages the most popular database engines like PostgreSQL®, Microsoft® SQL Server, and Oracle® Database across hybrid multicloud environments. Federal agencies can now easily and quickly scale database storage online, turning days of planning and testing into a one-click operation.
• Multi-region Database Failover Capabilities: Federal agencies can now enable Nutanix Era to be a highly available, multi-cloud control plane for database management. This compliments highly available databases by ensuring both the database itself and management of the database are protected against site-wide failures.
• Support for ServiceNow Workflows: Nutanix has integrated Nutanix Era® into the ServiceNow® platform. Using the Nutanix Era Plugin for Database Management integration to ServiceNow, Era and ServiceNow customers can use standard workflow processes to ease database requests and operations. Please read our blog to learn more about how ServiceNow workflows manage your database requests.

The recent Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity mandates that government IT must move to a “Zero Trust” architecture (ZTA). Nutanix can help government agencies close security gaps and start to align to ZTA, while modernizing IT to improve operations, increase agility as well as support mission success.

Nutanix follows a comprehensive Security Development Lifecycle (SecDL) which incorporates security into every step of the Nutanix software development process so that security is built-in, not bolted on. Further, our use of machine-readable STIGs enables government agencies to automatically validate and remediate violations regularly. AOS is a true cloud operating system, hardened out of the box to comply with STIGs and maintains this security baseline by self-healing deviations or “drift” with a system-wide Security Configuration Management Automation (SCMA) service.

Nutanix Era now delivers increased security capabilities through role-based access controls for shared access to databases and to database operations and tasks. This allows Federal agencies to easily implement their own security and compliance policies for database controls and accessibility. For instance, database administrators can use the new RBAC capabilities to share specific data with developers, while retaining control.