New Orleans Strengthens Resilience While Reducing Costs

When ransomware crippled New Orleans, the city purchased the Pure Storage platform to recover quickly with secure, scalable backups. This investment, coupled with an upgrade to the Pure Storage Evergreen//One subscription model, has since cut storage costs by 40%, doubled capacity, and boosted overall efficiency and resiliency.

Located along the banks of the Mississippi River, the City of New Orleans delivers citizen services to nearly 400,000 residents—the largest city population in Louisiana—with a commitment to serve with integrity, excellence, transparency, and innovation.

For Chief Information Officer Kimberly LaGrue, this mandate extends to the city’s 5,000 employees, who rely on technology to provide everything from parking, permits, and licenses to public safety. When her team was alerted to a cyber attack in 2019, they quickly shut down 470 servers, virtual machines, and thousands of computers. City services were temporarily paralyzed, disrupting everything from routine court operations to taxpayers attempting to make payments.

These early actions stopped the malware from spreading and encrypting all the city’s data—ultimately preventing the attackers from demanding a ransom.

“At the time, we didn’t know how far the attack had gone so we had to assume the worst,” says LaGrue. “We needed to test, cleanse, and store all of our data elsewhere to prevent further attacks while also getting our systems back online safely so that city services could continue.”

This required a new IT infrastructure and twice as much storage. And it provided an opportunity to update the city’s legacy and under-performing storage platform.

The city was already looking to update its storage when the attack took place. The decision to replace the entire storage footprint with Pure Storage was a simple one.

“The Pure Storage team showed up, rolled up their sleeves, and offered to help,” says LaGrue. “Within days, we had new equipment on site and were able to migrate our data into a production environment.”

The Pure Storage platform provides both primary storage and, along with software from Veeam, disaster recovery (DR). Pure Storage FlashArray//X replicates data to a second data center while Pure Storage FlashBlade, together with the SafeMode™ Snapshots feature, protects the city’s data backups from further ransomware attacks with indelible and immutable copies and early-detection capabilities.

“The Pure Storage platform takes the weight off our shoulders,” says LaGrue. “We know we can retrieve data quickly and safely if we need to, with minimal disruption to services.”

As part of its recovery efforts from the cyber attack and to mitigate the impact of future events, the City of New Orleans stood up a robust DR strategy in an off-site data center. This forward thinking paid off when Hurricane Ida made landfall two years later. As the city weathered a direct hit, the primary data center at City Hall caught fire, forcing an immediate failover to the DR site.

"Never in my life have I seen something perform so flawlessly and exactly as promised," says LaGrue. “With Pure Storage, it took us just hours to bring our systems back online. A recovery of this magnitude would have taken weeks with our previous storage systems.”

This level of efficiency is also felt daily. The two-person staff managing the city’s storage infrastructure spend less time on routine maintenance tasks, freeing them for more strategic projects. And with an Evergreen//Forever storage subscription to continuous software and hardware upgrades, the city significantly streamlined its storage refresh cycles—saving time and reducing total cost of ownership.

The City of New Orleans has since expanded its Pure Storage footprint, adding FlashArray//C systems to its DR site with Pure1 providing visibility across the entire storage footprint. It also shifted to the Evergreen//One storage-as-a-service (STaaS) subscription model for its FlashBlade system. The STaaS approach provides even more operational simplicity and an always-modern, non-disruptive architecture with the financial flexibility to pay only for the storage being used.

“The Evergreen//One model didn’t even exist when we purchased our first Pure Storage system, which is a testament to the company’s innovation,” says LaGrue. “We now pay 40% less for double the storage.”

With more storage capacity than ever and applications running faster than ever, the city is well-positioned to continue serving citizens as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.

“Our investment in Pure Storage has more than proven its short-term worth,” says LaGrue, “but we’re in it for the long-term value it provides to our citizens.”