Postgres Five 9s ‘Always On’ Availability in the Public Sector

The Public Sector Opportunity

According to Wikipedia, public sectors include public goods and governmental services such as the military, law enforcement, infrastructure, public transit, public education, health care, and those working for the government itself. Whether it is the Department of Defense (DoD), State, Local, and Education (SLED), or Federal and Government sectors, Public Sector organizations have unique needs. To meet these unique needs, worldwide government IT spending is expected to grow 6.8% in 2023, according to Gartner. 

Thanks to the transparency, security, and cost-efficiency that Open Source offers, the public sector is embracing modern solutions that make it possible to build better tools for citizens and organizations to access information. Rather than keeping government data in programmatic silos, their digital strategy seeks to build better services and engage in digital transformation that can offer secure and instantaneous information and services to users. 

Serving the Public Sector

EDB contribution to Public Sector

Catering to unique needs such as enhanced security, operational innovation, faster digital transformation, and scalability, EDB serves government organizations worldwide through Postgres, the most widely adopted open source database in government. EDB’s success in public-sector organizations includes examples of Data Migration from legacy databases and getting them onto open source for cost savings.

For government IT organizations asking how they can achieve their most ambitious initiatives with cost efficiency, the database answer could simply be Postgres. According to the latest research from USAspending.gov, the US federal government spent nearly $8 million in prime spending awards from FY 2021 through May 2023 to vendors, where Postgres was named in the solution. 

EDB’s Postgres solutions are trusted by government agencies because they meet applicable Federal information security standards. With EDB’s software solutions, the public sector gets the best of both worlds: modern and adaptable open source technology enhanced by enterprise-grade software, as well as best-in-class high availability and professional support from a trusted partner. Organizations in the public sector also want to encrypt their sensitive data, and EDB supports them in their endeavor with encryption tools like Transparent Data Encryption (TDE).

Typical Public Sector Use Cases

The need for Always-On

“Always-On” is the hallmark of digital transformation and operational resiliency, and several public sector organizations have unique needs, especially due to the mandate for High Availability of their applications and the sensitive nature of the data. However, sometimes high availability (traditionally maxing out at 99.99% uptime) is simply not high enough. Highly available databases that go above and beyond are essential to public sector organizations that depend on mission-critical, 24/7 access to data. EDB serves public sector organizations that need fault-tolerant, robust infrastructure to support resiliency and five-nines high availability with its flagship EDB Postgres Distributed product, offering an Extreme High Availability solution up to 99.999%.

Public Sector Use Cases

From operational resiliency to instant update applications, disaster recovery, and global data agility, public sector organizations are leveraging Postgres. Use cases may include applications for organizational planning, communication coordination using messaging apps, securely migrating security data, coordination of satellite data, or building the next-generation data center for providing services to all government entities. These use cases bring unique challenges because organizations may need to leverage hybrid infrastructure, mix heterogeneous data environments, keep data available at all times, deploy distributed databases, and enable rolling upgrades so that their infrastructure is up to date with the latest version of upgrades.

Distributed Postgres Solution for Five 9s High Availability in the Public Sector

How EDB Postgres Distributed helps Public Sector

EDB Postgres Distributed helps Public Sector organizations avoid the downfalls and risks of downtime and optimize Always-On architectures to seamlessly roll through upgrades, meet data localization compliance laws, and enable Postgres cross-version compatibility. PGD offers advanced logical replication that has 5X more throughput than Postgres native logical replication. 

With EDB Postgres Distributed, customers can deploy Active-Active architectures with global multi-write use cases on any infrastructure (cloud/on-premises/hybrid). EDB Postgres Distributed also offers a choice of asynchronous and synchronous consistency with custom consistency options such as Commit At Most Once (CAMO), Group Commit, and Eager so that organizations can choose the cost vs. time tradeoff. EDB Postgres Distributed enables seamless access to their Always-On, mission-critical, or can't-fail applications, often designated as Tier-1 applications. 

EDB Postgres Distributed Essentials v5 on-demand training is available free for all audiences on EDB’s training portal, and this training will prepare you to install, configure, manage, and monitor EDB Postgres Distributed and understand real-time data integration and replication in mission-critical systems. Finally, DBAs, SREs, or Developers with technical chops can also sign up for a 60-day trial and get hands-on experience with PGD by reading through the documentation and building out their use case. For advanced support, EDB also offers Postgres technical support and Professional Services.

Interested in learning about how EDB can help your specific use case in the public sector?
Watch a replay of our recent PGD in the Public Sector webinar, or see EDB Postgres Distributed in action by talking to our solution experts. If you want to model the monetary impact of downtime, contact us, and EDB’s experts can also model out a scenario to help with your business case.