The Feds and the rest of public sector…
(Note: This blog was written by Paul Christman, VP of Public Sector Sales for Quest Software and was posted with permission.)
Quest Software, DLT and NetApp recently sponsored a panel discussion in Washington to discuss data center consolidation and cloud computing. The panel participants were progressive well-respected IT leaders from different federal agencies that had all launched consolidation projects. The speakers reported that most projects would take several years and acknowledged that consolidations were really evolutionary transformations to achieve long term objectives.
The ultimate goal for each agency is to have no more than 5 major production sites with total capacity to serve both the current and future needs. Even after consolidating and increasing utilization rates, the plans predicted there would be excess IT capacity – theoretically this capacity could be “reallocated” to other entities.
And that’s where the conversation got interesting. I asked why this excess capacity couldn’t be “sold” to non-federal agencies. The goal would be simple: include more paying tenants in the new datacenters to increase economies of scale and decrease per unit costs for everyone. Put another way, “Why can’t a state government or state university share a data center with the State Department?” The responses were varied, but the truth became readily apparent.
Consolidation can only reach as far as the budget process allows. IT consolidations are limited by the distance money can travel. If you can’t easily transfer money between entities, then you can’t share IT services. Consolidation can reduce internal silos, but the results are just fewer and bigger silos within a financial boundary. In my humble opinion, we are missing an opportunity for even greater financial gains if these budgetary boundaries do not become more flexible. Please add ‘reshaping budgetary policy” to the already long list of tasks assigned to our public sector IT leaders.
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