The advent of new technologies and the accelerating pace of change is leading to greater privatization of data storage. Older, less secure government data centers may not be long for this earth, says a Gartner report.
Mary Scott Nabers explains why government data centers are like dinosaurs in this report from Born2Invest:
Strange as it seems, almost everything related to technology has changed over the past decade. The Internet of Things (IoT), big data, cloud storage, interconnected services, apps of every type, software as a service (SaaS) and the immediate need for digital infrastructure – these are the components forcing extreme and immediate modernization. Older data centers simply cannot provide the capacity, equipment, resources and services that are required today. Couple that grim reality with the risks associated with cybersecurity and it’s understandable why privatization is attractive to government leaders.
Commercial data centers face the same hurdles. Together, the two sectors have created an extremely large new marketplace. The global data center colocation market is projected to grow to $50.18 billion by the end of 2020.
Every jurisdiction of government has been impacted. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is currently asking for industry input as to how the agency should consolidate two enterprise computing data centers. DHS also wants industry input on how to implement an enhanced cloud-based infrastructure with “a multi-cloud, federated and vendor-neutral” cloud strategy. This will result in a large contracting opportunity for some private-sector firm.
DHS has 6 percent of its 628 applications in the cloud and would like to have 30 percent migrated by next year. Further opportunity lies in the announcement that a DHS data center supporting 10 component agencies, 133 systems, and 8,000 devices is slated to be shut down by 2020. Soon a request for qualifications (RFQ) will be announced because the agency will be seeking private-sector partners to handle the work.
