Federal Manager's Daily Report

The administration has launched the “data center optimization initiative,” following up on a prior data center consolidation initiative with a renewed emphasis on reducing the energy and real estate footprint of government data centers and reducing the cost of data center hardware, software, and operations.

Other goals of the initiative are to improve the government’s overall IT security and shift IT investments to more efficient computing platforms and technologies, according to the announcement from OMB.

It said that under the previous initiative, and in compliance with the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act, agencies have closed more than 1,900 data centers and have reduced their footprint by more than 1.2 million square feet—resulting in $1 billion in savings and gains in efficiency and security.

The new initiative will require agencies to achieve targets such as tighter monitoring of energy use and to close more centers over the next three years with a goal of reducing the number by about half and the real estate footprint by about a third and reducing costs by a quarter in that time.

Other aspects include strengthened and direct CIO authority over data center-related budgeting and management decisions, increased use of cloud and inter-agency shared services, and replacement of manual data collection with automated monitoring.