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In reading Mel Duvall’s report on President Obama’s proposed federal IT spending plans, I was blown away by the following statistic: how the number of agency data centers has more than doubled since 1998 from 432 to 1,100 data centers last year.
At a time when most IT organizations in the private sector have pushed hard to consolidate their respective IT footprints and strive to become more cost efficient (not to mention more environmentally responsible), it’s simply mind-boggling how federal IT leaders and watchdog agencies like the Government Accountability Office could have allowed this kind of data center expansion to occur seemingly unchecked.
It’s certainly not shocking – after all, this is the government we’re talking about. And there are certainly a number of forces at play here. Most agencies are silo’d from one another. And prior to the appointment of federal CIO Vivek Kundra, there wasn’t much in the way of a central control point to oversee and coordinate federal IT spending and coordination. The geometric expansion of data storage in recent years has no doubt exacerbated the situation.
But if there’s a silver lining to this sad state of affairs it’s this: the situation provides Kundra and other federal IT leaders to take some meaningful actions for making government IT operations run a lot more efficiently.
Server and storage virtualization efforts on a massive scale are no-brainers. The budget also calls for agencies to make more extensive use of cloud computing, particularly where agencies can utilize servers and storage through the cloud instead of owning and maintaining systems themselves.
There are obvious security concerns that would prevent many agencies from having some of their data hosted by third-party providers via the Internet. But there are probably just as many opportunities for federal agencies to share hardware and even common software applications between each other.
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