The federal government is now a half-decade into the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative, a sweeping plan to downsize federal agencies’ data centers and their associated costs. Thousands of data centers have been shut down since the program’s launch, and hundreds of those have been at the Defense Department. But now DoD leaders want to take a different approach.
While most DoD officials have said that data center closures and application rationalization have cut down on costs and freed up IT infrastructure, the Pentagon’s CIO now says it’s the quality, not the quantity, that is most important as DoD moves more IT functions and services to the cloud.
Opportunity: DoD CIO Terry Halvorsen is one of several high-level keynote speakers at the 14th annual C4ISR & Networks Conference, titled “The Intelligence Age Military.” The conference takes place April 7 in Crystal City, Va. Other keynote speakers include DISA Director Ronnie Hawkins and LTG Mark Bowman, who is director of C4/ Cyber and Chief Information Officer of the Joint Staff, J6/CIO. Click here for more information and to register.
With DoD closer to its goal of trimming down to a handful of core data centers, focus now is turned toward reducing applications that essentially do the same things within different agencies. It’s a model that is in keeping with broader militarywide moves toward enterprise IT and services.
But DoD CIO Terry Halvorsen emphasizes that it’s not necessarily just about the numbers when it comes to the consolidation and rationalization efforts. To that end, he’s shifting the way DoD leadership measures how well components are doing.
“One of the most recent things we’ve done is to refocus our internal metrics to focus on dollars and performance rather than numbers of servers and data centers. I really want to focus the discussion on how data gets distributed, what’s the right number of distribution nodes, how I drive costs down, and where does government need to be in that business versus where we let industry do it,” Halvorsen said. “It hasn’t progressed as quickly as I’d like it to, but it’s very complex, and it’s also complicated by the fact that most of the military services’ existing data centers have contractual arrangements today that we also have to work through.”
Conquering the mountain of applications
DoD leadership has issued guidance to help the services go through the process of rationalizing their thousands of applications, including a memo released in July 2014 from the Army secretary directing the service’s components in scaling down data centers and applications.
The rationalization process involves evaluating each application and determining if it should be modernized, migrated to the cloud or shut down. But it’s a big job — at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, alone, there are roughly 11,000 applications that must be sorted through, according to Army CIO/G-6 LTG Robert Ferrell.
Ferrell noted that application rationalization is a critical part of the Army’s preparation for the force of 2020 under the recently released Army Network Campaign Plan — guidance that omits specific target numbers for consolidation, but emphasizes the need for a more streamlined, cloud-enabled network.
“To adhere to DoD mandates and lay the foundation for future cloud computing capabilities, the Army will continue to consolidate and transition standalone data center solutions to DoD-authorized enterprise hosting environments. The Army will undertake a major rationalization effort for current applications to prepare for and enable this transition,” the ANCP states. “These initiatives will lay the computing foundation for future-year data support and data analytics across the network. They also will enable the retirement and divestiture of standalone data centers, redundant applications and obsolete support infrastructure to reduce or avoid unnecessary costs for sustainment and modernization.”
To help component officials zero in on the massive effort, it’s likely the Pentagon will direct them to concentrate on categories to help sort and organize the myriad of applications.
“I think what you’re going to see is, we’re going to take a look at categories of applications to focus on. And really what the guidance may be doing is directing the services and other organizations to ask questions,” Halvorsen said. “Take logistics: We have a lot of logistics applications, and probably we’ll always have a lot. But we will be asking questions of the services — if you have applications that do these logistics functions, how many of them do you have, and to follow on, why do you need that many and what’s your business case for that?”
In some organizations, these efforts already are bearing fruit in the form of savings and efficiencies, according to some DoD officials. At the Defense Health Agency, rationalization efforts are currently under way — but they aren’t necessarily easily, officials admit.
“We’re rationalizing our portfolio of the existing applications and solutions that we have. [We want] one Military Health System solution vice three or four applications, which is typically the case,” said Col Chip Terry, Air Force Medical Service CIO. “In MHS we had 26 applications for e-learning, and we’re in the process of going down to one. It’s extremely tough work; you don’t just go in [and] turn it off. You have to communicate with the end user and have an exit strategy and plan for how to take care of their needs.”
Nearing the target
Despite the struggles, Halvorsen is confident DoD is making progress that is, despite reports to the contrary, on par with commercial counterparts.
“We take a lot of comments about how far we are behind industry in application rationalization. I look at the numbers … in DoD I have at least five big companies. When you look at that and scope and size, we’re actually not that far behind where industry is,” Halvorsen said. “You have to remember what will happen is people will say, ‘Listen, this company or group of companies managed to collapse their applications by [a certain date],’ and then they give you a list of the companies, and they’re all in one business, such as the IT business. OK, well, if you measured me in just my IT business, I’m probably doing OK. But if you’re looking across IT, logistics, medical, real estate — pick a business — when I look at that and talk to my colleagues and [industry], we’re not far off that mark. We’ve got to do better, and we want to improve the speed we’re doing it at, but I think you’d get the same answer if you talk to Fortune 50 multinational CIOs. They’d say, yup, we’re in it, we want to do better, and we want to get more results from it quicker.”
