Fewer facilities will rely on the cloud to handle a growing workload
Looking to increase IT efficiency and slash costs, the military is consolidating the number of data centers it operates. In August, the Defense Department CIO’s office confirmed there will be fewer military data centers by the close of the fiscal year as part of a larger federal IT reform plan started by the Obama administration.
“We have closed eight data centers since the IT reform plan was published, and we intend to close another 44 by the end of fiscal 2011,” wrote Teri Takai, DOD's CIO, in an Aug. 9 blog entry on the CIO.gov website. “DOD remains committed to identifying candidates for data center closure and consolidation in support of the [Defense] Secretary’s efficiency efforts and the IT reform plan goal of closing 800 Federal data centers by 2015.”
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As the military’s data center footprint shrinks and information is concentrated into fewer locations, increasing attention is being paid to the way data is being stored and protected at a time when potential attackers have better and more powerful access and retrieval tools.
DOD’s data center downsizing strategy dovetails with a larger governmentwide data center reduction program, the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI). Launched in 2010, the mandate from the federal CIO requires agencies to reduce the overall energy and real estate footprint of their data centers, with the targeted goals of reduced costs, increased security and improved efficiency.
Officials at the Office of Management and Budget "have given us a target, by 2015, of 432 data centers for DOD across the board,” said a senior DOD official who requested anonymity. “Right now, we have, based on our submission to OMB last August, 772 data centers in the department,” he said. “So we're looking at nearly a 40 percent reduction over the next several years.”
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