Andy Reed
A recent study underwritten by ViON and Hitachi Vantara Federal has found that approximately half of a surveyed 150 federal IT managers and decision makers believe that data centers do not currently meet mission needs.
MeriTalk announced the details of its new report, “Data Center 2020: Federal Modernization in Focus” in a release on Monday, submitting a recommendation to industry members that in order to meet the Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) deadlines, their data center modernization strategy needs to be applied agency-wide with a leadership team in order to develop and deliver a formal vision for the future of data centers.
“The agencies making the most progress are laying the foundation for a flexible hybrid cloud environment,” said Jeff Henry, President of ViON Corporation. “They are implementing highly-scalable hyper-converged infrastructure. Many are using a Data Center as-a-service model to reduce upfront costs, implementation risk, and complexity.”
Prior to the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) decision to push the deadline to 2020, the study agrees that the majority of agencies were not going to meet the original deadline of Sept. 20, 2018.
According to the findings, agencies are considering new acquisition models to make gains in modernization efforts, with 64 percent of Federal IT managers stating that their agency’s data center acquisitions are beginning to shift toward utility-based or pay-as-you-go models.
A bite-sized 19 percent of Federal IT managers said their agency was “very likely” to meet the original deadline to close an estimated 25 percent of tiered data centers, with a purported 13 percent specifying that they would meet the requirement to close 60 percent of non-tiered data centers.
“The data center modernization decisions agencies [made] today will impact their ability to take advantage of next-generation IoT and A.I. technologies,” said Dave Turner, President and CEO of Hitachi Vantara Federal. “Being able to integrate and optimize these emerging technologies will provide critical data intelligence allowing our customers to increase their speed to mission success.”
Although leaders in the Federal data center industry might agree that the primary focus falls on security and compatibility with emerging technologies in the modernization process, the results suggest that progress in these areas is scant. The survey shows that 39 percent give themselves an “A” for data center security, with just 10 percent giving their data centers “A”‘s for displaying ability in supporting emerging technology.
ViON Corp. will be discussing the survey results of “Data Center 2020: Federal Modernization in Focus” at AFCEA West this week (Booth 1004), along with a pre-brief on the new ViON Marketplace which will offer solutions across a wide portfolio of storage, compute, networking to the government as-a-Service.
###
