Powerful storage platform and convenient self-service portal boost productivity
In Sweden, 2.2 million people received national retirement pension in 2018. 7.5m current and future pensioners were issued with individual orange envelopes presenting their updated pension forecast. The Swedish Pensions Agency’s total payments for pensions and other benefits amounted to SEK 350 billion in 2018. Behind these figures, there is a digital shake-up at the Pensions Agency which is being driven by huge amounts of data.
Challenge
As the Pensions Agency’s contract with its data centre service provider was due to expire, the agency decided to expand its collaboration with another large government organisation, the Social Insurance Agency (Swedish: Försäkringskassan). When thinking about how to migrate IT operations to the Social Insurance Agency from its previous data centre, the Pensions Agency identified several opportunities for improvement. Once of these was the need for an improved change management process, in addition to a more productive test and development environment.
Solution
The first step towards a new solution was to select a data centre storage platform. A NetApp’s snapshot cloning technology was the most cost-efficient alternative.
With snapshot technology a snapshot image of the database is created, reducing the disk space required to make a usable database clone by an order of magnitude – from terabytes to gigabytes. It also means that the cloning process runs much faster.
“As users it’s great to have a solution that works and we now get more time to spend on other tasks. We have better availability to our development environment because we have a good, automated solution”
