Study Reveals Lack of Confidence in Federal Data Centers' Capability

A recent study from MeriTalk – “Flash Forward – The Future of the Federal Data Center,” from a partnership that seeks to improve government IT infrastructure – shows that only a little more than a tenth of federal IT managers believe their agencies are ready to meet current institutional goals.

Federal IT managers showed in the MeriTalk survey of 150 federal IT managers that only 11 percent of the whole believe their data centers are “fully equipped” to deal with present-day demands. Furthermore, only five percent indicated that their systems will be ready for the demands of 2021 – just five years away. Managers’ concerns about security, power consumption, and footprint could find ease in best practices, modern equipment, and cloud computing that the study predicted could save a total of $10 billion each year.

Steve O’Keefe, the founder of MeriTalk, commented on that figure:

“If you want to realize real savings, who could afford to sneeze at $10 billion? The IT revolving capital fund in the president’s budget will play a significant role in enabling federal data center modernization to unlock these savings,” O’Keefe said.

Clearly, O’Keefe has called the president to take a more active stance on helping develop the government infrastructure.

What could $10 billion achieve if proactively allocated to various agencies? It could help hire more IT security professionals who are trained in modern IT practices. Their presence could bring a host of best practices to various agencies and give existing employees a new way of looking at the health of their data centers.

Such professionals may only be able to initiate best practices with the use of modern hardware, so that money could help agencies transition away from on-site data centers and move their data into the cloud. This could lead to the development of leadership teams that oversee individual aspects of data center operations such as mixing on-site and cloud systems, allocating bandwidth for individual tasks, and updating security policies with new practices in the field.

Overall, the current set of IT managers feels unprepared to handle all these tasks. They may also not have the funds to complete all the future-facing tasks that could improve their organizations as a whole. To be ready for the demands of 2021, it will take a joint effort between those in control of funding and those individual managers in control of spending their share. It is unclear whether or not MeriTalk believes this type of orchestrated effort could become a reality; MeriTalk only shows that it believes the time for change rests in the present.