Consolidating Federal data centers through adoption of cloud and shared services has the “greatest potential” for streamlining the use of Federal resources, according to Thomas Santucci, director of the Data Center and Cloud Optimization Infrastructure Program Management Office at the General Services Administration (GSA).
Through initiatives such as Cloud Smart, the Federal government is urging agencies to migrate applications to the cloud or a shared services platform. “This has the greatest potential for cost savings, increased service delivery or business resiliency,” Santucci said at the May 20 930Gov Virtual Cloud Conference. “Shared services is the cornerstone of data center consolidation.”
Cloud Smart, he continued, has introduced Federal agencies to the concept of application rationalization – requiring agencies to identify what applications are running within their data centers to facilitate optimization. Agencies must identify costs that aren’t always known “like that edge computing in the downtown building, the network it relies on, and the labor to maintain both IT and the facility to house IT equipment,” Santucci explained.
“Some agencies are positioned better than others,” he said. “Agencies that are doing really well are mostly in the cloud with little or no impact.”
Santucci called GSA “a great success story” of a transition to the cloud. He said that amid the mass telework transition, remote users do not need Virtual Private Networks to access their emails and files, collaboration tools have reduced file duplicates, and bandwidth consumption is between home internet and the cloud.
