Eight years after the federal government launched an effort to streamline and consolidate the operations of its data centers, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) declared the effort a failure.
Larry Dignan wrote this report for the Between the Lines blog published by ZDNet:
GAO’s report, which weighs in as a 98 page PDF, is an indictment of US government technology operations. While it notes a few consolidation and optimization wins, the US government’s data center footprint is as bloated as ever. In 2010, the OMB launched a Federal data center consolidation effort with 2018 savings targets. While there were some successes, the Feds have failed with their data center efforts.
According to the GAO report: Federal data center consolidation (DCOI) efforts have been underway since 2010 and OMB’s fiscal year 2018 targets provided clear and transparent goals that helped define the tangible benefits that DCOI was expected to provide. However, most agencies continue to report mixed progress against those targets. Although agencies have taken action to close about half of the data centers in their combined inventories, 11 agencies did not plan to meet all of their closure targets. Further, the data center closures were expected to drive cost savings and avoidances and, to the agencies’ credit, the closures have led to more than $2.37 billion in planned and achieved cost savings and avoidances from fiscal years 2016 through 2018. However, five agencies did not plan to meet their cost savings targets.
Until agencies consolidate the data centers required to meet their targets, as well as identify and report the associated cost savings, they will be challenged to realize expected efficiencies and the full benefits of DCOI will not be fully realized. From there, the GAO calls out commissioners and agencies failing to hit data center closure targets for more than three pages of the report.
Part of the solution to this data center conundrum could be a hybrid approach. After all, it’s not realistic to assume the government is going to lift and shift everything to the cloud. In addition, the GAO noted the agencies didn’t use server utilization and automated monitoring, virtualization or energy metering.
