Case Study: USDA simplifies data management and saves staff 30 hours per week with Cohesity

USDA Simplifies Data Management, Saving Staff 30 Hours a Week

The USDA Office of the Chief Information Officer’s Digital Infrastructure Services Center (DISC) supports multi‑petabyte data management for five agencies and nearly 20 federal customers. DISC was struggling with rising costs, data silos, long retention requirements and complex operations—running multiple appliances (Veritas/Data Domain) across two sites, manually managing policies and capacity, and spending excessive staff time while facing long procurement cycles.

DISC selected Cohesity (with WWT and cloud partners) to consolidate backup, target storage and cloud archiving. The platform deployed quickly, connected to AWS GovCloud/Azure for tiering, and enabled API‑driven self‑service and uniform management across sites. Results include ~30 staff-hours saved per week, a 50% lower TCO, reduced over‑provisioning, faster restorations and improved scalability and staff responsiveness.

USDA

George Strother

Storage Management Branch Chief