With federal IT departments spending an estimated 50 percent of their budgets on life-cycle support, agencies have been looking to the private sector for efficiencies.
Following White House guidance, there has been a major push to outsource server hosting and clouds services to commercial data centers. As part of their contracts, commercial providers are responsible for the maintenance and security of the hardware and data under their care. While some have expressed fears over security, others see IT as just another service contract among many.
“I don’t care how the electricity comes into the building, so why do I care how the IT infrastructure comes in?” Walt Bigelow, Chief of the Information Technology Systems Management Division, Office of Science and Technology at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, & Explosives, said at a MeriTalk Data Center Brainstorm in March.
“It forces us to trust our vendors,” Alissa Johnson, Deputy Chief Information Officer for the Executive Office of the President, said at the brainstorm. “If something goes down, we want to run to our server and see the red light blinking. That’s not really the way of the future.”
While agencies may not be able to see their servers, even cloud services are not as “nebulous” as many assume, according to Norm Laudermilch, Chief Operating Officer for
Verizon Terremark’s [VZ] Federal Group. Part of Laudermilch’s job is to oversee the company’s Culpeper, Va., data center–a 30-acre campus that consumes more energy than the entirety of the county where it’s located.
Laudermilch said the data center is “custom tailored” to the federal customer and that Verizon had worked with the government on its construction before it opened in 2008.
“They basically told us we had to build a military base for IT infrastructure,” he said.
The center sits more than 60 miles from Washington, which was considered the acceptable “blast radius” in the instance of an attack on the capital. No cars are allowed within the reinforced walls and all of the employees hold security clearances. An earthquake was only able to crack the sidewalk.
The campus currently has five buildings with 50,000 square feet of floor space each. Each building has 11 generators–which Laudermilch described as the size of “train engines”–that can turn on in seconds in case of a power outage.
Verizon owns the campus, but 20 carriers rent floor space for managed hosting and cloud services. Several of the buildings also include custom-designed Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIFs) to host classified information.
While IT departments may not be able to “hug their servers,” as Johnson says of reluctant IT managers, the new model of outsourced IT may provide more security. Laudermilch remembers when opening a closet at the Pentagon could reveal a computer server, which most likely wasn’t being monitored.
In addition to security improvements, outsourcing to commercial providers allows IT departments to only pay for what they need. Laudermilch said he has seen Verizon cloud customers save up to 70 percent on IT costs with this flexibility. A public-facing Department of Defense agency was running its own data center but decided to adopt the cloud two years ago. In times of extreme usage, the agency’s applications needed to grow by 200-300 percent. The agency found it could not achieve this flexibility outside of the cloud.
“The government has a unique opportunity to not be in the business of owning [IT] things, but focus on our mission,” Johnson said.
Spending less on life-cycle support means more money toward software developers and innovation, she said.