Jane Edwards
Some federal agencies including the U.S. Postal Service and the International Development Finance Corporation are now adopting preconfigured, plug-and-play technologies to speed up deployment and meet their operational requirements, FedTech Magazine reported Thursday.
Jonathan Alboum, federal chief technology officer at ServiceNow, said the use of plug-and-play systems not only reflects the transition to a service- or cloud-based mindset but also accelerates digital transformation efforts at agencies, which he said had to create their own infrastructure and oversee all the associated hardware and software in the past.
“As the federal government became more focused on data center consolidation concepts, some of those smaller IT operations were subsumed into larger enterprise operations at the department level or a governmentwide service provider,” Alboum said. “The focus moved toward, ‘What solutions are available to me?’”
Plug-and-play systems could also enable agencies to centralize operations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for instance, has implemented NVIDIA’s Bright Cluster Manager computing platform to manage the main and satellite locations of a clustered environment through a single interface.
“Simplicity is a driver for a lot of things we do,” Alboum said.
“The quest for less complexity and for not having to spend more engineering time on something is very, very attractive,” he added.
