Seagate Gov’t Subsidiary to Hone on Multi-Level Security Challenges at Agencies

Data storage company Seagate started its new U.S. government-focused business with the goal to help federal agencies establish and carry out their roadmaps for the adoption of technologies and new methods to store increasing volumes of data, unit leaders have told ExecutiveBiz.

Seagate unveiled the business in November and said the unit will also focus on work with agencies on high-performance computing initiatives and security of workflows.

The Seagate Government Solutions business functions as a subsidiary of the parent company that bases its global headquarters in Dublin, Ireland with the central U.S. operations hub in Cupertino, Calif.

Deb Oliver, who will lead the subsidiary as president, described in a briefing to ExecutiveBiz the business’ short-term strategy as seeking to make agencies aware of what Seagate offers in its product portfolio and understand government requirements in big data storage and management.

One component of that portfolio is Seagate’s ClusterStor product the company built to give users with different classifications access to a single-server storage environment and Oliver said the company will offer a version of the platform with a secure data appliance.

“The key parts of helping government through big data are the total cost of ownership and solving the end-to-end problem relative to ingest, access and the security domain,” Oliver said.

“We’re seeking to address the challenging aspects of multi-level security many agencies are facing.”

The high-performance computing arena has shifted away from a strict modeling-and-simulation model to one with data fusion as the focus, Chief Technology Officer Henry Newman said.

“Agencies are trying to create new information with that data and from disparate sources,” Newman said.

Sales Vice President Mike Moritzkat said defense agencies in particular are using their technical computing platforms to do the same type of work that HPC technologies do.

“The HPC world is starting to demand the features, functions and reliability of what the enterprise did previously.”