According to reports issued over the weekend, the US federal government has chosen 100 data centers to close over the course of this year, part of a larger overall government plan to reduce IT spending, in large part through outsourcing operations to hosting service providers.
The government’s plan involves moving resources to “cloud computing” environments, which in a lot of old school IT organizations (and as US organization go, the federal government is pretty old-school) can mean something more like “hosted,” rather than anything related to the more modern cloud technology and business models dominating the hosting business these days.
Endorsement of cloud computing service provider business models or not, the government plan to start outsourcing much more of its resources to service providers is a big opportunity for those hosting providers with the credentials to bid on big government hosting deals.
According to a report in the Washington Post, federal CIO Vivek Kundra said last week that the government is getting ready to move about 75 programs to cloud computing in order to comply with the its new “cloud first” policy.
Kundra, says the Post, has made consolidating and outsourcing IT resources a key part of his plan for evolving federal government IT practices and spending. Since the release of his 25-point plan last year, Kundra has pushed for agencies to produce quick results in identifying facilities and programs well suited to being moved to the cloud.
In its 2012 federal budget proposal, made in February, the Obama administration first proposed the consolidation and outsourcing of data center resources as a means of cutting back on expenditures.
In March , we reported that the New York State government was taking a different approach, with the creation of a new state government-run data center that would consolidate the IT resources of up to 40 agencies over the coming years.
The federal government has close to 2,100 data centers, including both owned and leased facilities larger than 500 square feet, and according to Kundra’s comments last week, intends to close 800 of them over the next few years.
The Post article quotes David A. Powner director of IT management issues at the Government Accountability Office, who calls the 800 data center plan a “stretch goal,” meaning that it is particularly ambitious.
Part of Kundra’s program included the creation of the US government’s new IT Dashboard, a website that issues details on government IT spending.
The Post says the GAO issued a report last month saying that the dashboard is improving, but still has significant inaccuracies in data reported by agencies, relating to how well they have met their budgets.
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