Editor’s Note: CRE is long on record explaining the need for: 1) Metrics to assess the costs and security effectiveness of the federal move to a cloud computing environment; 2) Public review and comment on the tools and baselines used to assess ROI on federal IT spending; and 3) Measurement tools are needed to assess the impact of federal data center consolidation.
From: Nextgov
By Joseph Marks
An initiative to consolidate federal data centers has yielded minimal savings so far and the government is unlikely to meet its goal of $3 billion in savings by 2015, the Government Accountability Office said in a report Tuesday.
Agencies have also failed to adequately report on their data center cost savings and officials at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and the General Services Administration have done too little to force that reporting, David Powner, GAO’s director of information technology issues, testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s panel on Government Operations.
Only five of 24 federal agencies have reported estimated data center consolidation savings through 2014 and those savings total less than $700 million, according to documents provided by the subcommittee.
The proposed savings will come from moving government data to computer clouds and using more efficient data centers that burn less energy and consume less real estate.
The White House is likely to reach its goal of $3 billion in data center savings but not by the planned date of 2015, Powner testified. His chief criticism of Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative leaders was not that they’d botched the initiative itself but that, lacking adequate data they were unlikely to wring all possible savings out of it.
“We need better leadership out of OMB and the GSA program office if we expect the data center consolidation initiative to be effective,” he said. “With OMB that starts with the federal [chief information officer] and for agency CIOs this needs to be a top priority.”
Data center savings are likely to follow a hockey stick pattern, federal CIO Steven VanRoekel has said, with more savings accruing in later years.
In March, VanRoekel merged the data center consolidation initiative with PortfolioStat, a program aimed at draining inefficiencies from government technology operations. Powner called that merger a natural fit on Tuesday, so long as agencies begin to adequately measure cost savings.
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