The Office of Management and Budget has introduced a three-year program that aims to require federal agencies to develop and execute strategies that seek to reduce the footprint of data centers and build up the federal government’s information technology security posture.
Federal Chief Information Officer Tony Scott wrote in a blog post published Monday the Data Center Optimization Initiative was introduced to comply with the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act’s data centers provisions as well as to build on the accomplishments of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative that OMB launched in 2010.
DCOI has set five government-wide optimization targets for tiered data centers, such as the use of power usage effectiveness, facility utilization, virtualization and server utilization metrics, as well as installation of energy meters.
The initiative also sets a goal to close approximately 52 percent of all data centers across the federal government over a three-year period and aims to reach $2.7 billion in cost savings and avoidances from the consolidation of duplicative data centers by the end of fiscal year 2018, wrote Scott, an inductee into Executive Mosaic’s Wash100 for 2016.
Scott noted that the initiative also calls for agencies to adopt cloud and inter-agency shared services.
Denise Turner Roth, head of the General Services Administration, announced Monday that GSA’s office of government-wide policy will serve as a shared services managing partner of OMB under DCOI.
Roth, also an inductee into Executive Mosaic’s Wash100 for 2016, said OGP will set up a shared services marketplace in support of efforts to optimize data centers across federal agencies.
She also cited OGP’s efforts to help agencies manage their data centers, such as the evaluation of data center infrastructure management tools and collaboration with the Federal Acquisition Service and Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program to provide agencies with information on cloud service providers.
