For the past five years, Kimberly A. McCoy has served as the Chief Information Officer at the Bureau of the Public Debt. McCoy runs IT operations that support mission-critical functions for the Treasury Department's two Fiscal Service bureaus, Public Debt and the Financial Management Service, as well as the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. McCoy recently led the Fiscal IT data center consolidation effort – a high-impact initiative to consolidate the IT resources of Treasury's Fiscal Service. The first of this scale, Fiscal IT is leading efforts across Federal agencies in direct support of the Office of Management and Budget's Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative.

McCoy rallied the Fiscal IT project team and initiated planning at all levels across the bureaus. She and her team developed actionable plans to close data centers in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia, and to consolidate those data centers into two remaining Fiscal IT data centers in Missouri and West Virginia. Under McCoy's leadership, all three data centers were successfully closed.

Fiscal IT met its two main goals – successfully consolidate five data centers to two in two years and make possible a consolidation that will achieve cumulative government-wide cost savings of $128 million over five years, starting in fiscal year 2012.

In addition to integrating IT infrastructures, McCoy was responsible for the integration and realignment of management responsibilities, as well as the realignment of impacted personnel. The expert planning, human capital management, compassion for impacted employees, and excellent relationship with the National Treasury Employees Union led to the successful realignment of more than 100 personnel.

McCoy epitomizes the model Federal executive in her ability to visualize a future state, effectively communicate her vision, and maintain quality operations while successfully implementing that vision. Her commitment to excellence, dedication to her work, and sense of personal accountability led to the consolidation of three data centers and cost savings of more than $128 million in five years (beginning in 2012). McCoy and her team are extraordinary examples of what you can accomplish with data center consolidation.

Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Nally is the Director for Command, Control, Communications, and Computers (C4) for the U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) and is responsible for planning, directing, and coordinating all staff activities relating to C4 functions. Brig. Gen. Nally spent the past 14 months leading the virtualization of the USMC networks and championing the consolidation of USMC's data centers in a regional approach focused solely on supporting Marines deployed around the globe.

The Marine Corps Regionalization initiative reduces the number of servers at remote sites and moves remaining servers to one of several regional centers supporting various functional areas (e.g., financial applications, logistics, and manpower). Recently the program achieved a huge milestone, declaring the Marine Corps' Federated Data Center located in Kansas City Initially Operational Capable. The Marine Corps Enterprise IT Services (MCEITS) center hosts the Corps' programs and the Enterprise Service Desk in a federated, distributed, and deployable environment to support the warfighter with a flexible, secure, and scalable network, enabling access to information and knowledge-based data rapidly anywhere, anyplace, at any time.

Virtualizing the environment will save millions of dollars over the next five years as USMC consolidates resources, improves network availability and security, saves energy, and reduces personnel requirements. To date, the environment is 75 percent virtualized and the number of data centers has reduced from 35 to 11, with eight of these fully functional and operational. Through its regionalization effort, the Marine Corps, under Brig. Gen. Nally's leadership, will be the first ever Department of Defense (DOD) organization to in‐source a major IT network of communications and computing infrastructure, enterprise services, end users devices, processes, and people.

Brig. Gen. Nally's vision for managing IT as a strategic asset is resulting in immediate and long-term benefits. By transitioning cyber network operations to a regionalized Government Owned/ Government Operated model, Brig. Gen. Nally's team is enhancing the Marine Corps' organizational and tactical agility and flexibility, as well as improving information sharing across the total force. The Corps' data center consolidation efforts and MCEITS are becoming the model for the other Services including Initial Denial Authority, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Security Agency, and U.S. Cyber Command. Brig. Gen. Nally's leadership solidified a path for the Marine Corps Information Enterprise Strategy that reinforces the primary tenants of DOD IT efficiencies, such as data center consolidation, cloud computing, virtualization, bandwidth optimization, and IT strategic sourcing. Brig. Gen. Nally identified opportunities for significant cost reductions in IT spending with data center consolidation.

Over the past few years, the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Los Alamos National Laboratory's (LANL) Green IT and cloud computing initiatives had a goal to build an agile, truly sustainable computing environment. The team embarked on a journey to transform its IT infrastructure by implementing virtualization and consolidating data centers.

To accomplish this, the team launched "Infrastructure on Demand" (IoD). IoD is a cloud platform that enables researchers to automatically request and provision virtual servers via a self-service Web portal. IoD is the first infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) private cloud in the DOE. In September 2011, this platform extended to become YOURcloud, the Federal Government's first secure hybrid community IaaS cloud. LANL fostered a nation-wide community of collaboration that did not previously exist, enabling the NNSA and DOE to capitalize on their investments and save taxpayer dollars.

The YOURcloud architecture is an innovative secure, multi-tenant hybrid community cloud that allows sites to retain their own autonomy while leveraging a common cloud computing platform. The IoD platform will front end this department-wide cloud to allow DOE/NNSA labs, plants, and headquarters to deploy resources into individually managed, secure cloud enclaves, resulting in the Federal government's first department-wide secure hybrid community cloud.

The Building YOURcloud initiative resulted in the decommission of 100 physical servers, deployed 400 virtual machines onto 13 hosts, retired three data centers, reduced carbon footprint by 50 percent, and saved the organization more than $2.8 million a year in cost savings/avoidance. All of this allowed NNSA to enhance its disaster recovery/business continuity planning capabilities.

Nothing in green IT is easy, but the research, planning, and collaborative approach to implementing new technologies has ensured the success of the efforts and brought real value to NNSA, the related facilities and labs, and the broader DOE complex. The commitment to collaboration extends across the DOE and the Federal government, as they willingly share lessons learned to help others craft their own virtualization strategies and address common problems. Their efforts and processes are fostering a nation-wide, collaborative community that did not exist previously, enabling NNSA and DOE to capitalize on their investments and save taxpayer dollars.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), like all other Federal agencies is facing shrinking budgets and is charged with finding efficiencies to help better use compute and resources to effectively deliver their mission. Ira 'Gus' Hunt, Chief Technology Officer for the Chief Information Officer of the CIA was charged with finding a way to optimize internal resources while increasing service and mission delivery. To address this need, Mr. Hunt and his team, in partnership with Microsoft, Dell and FlexPoint Technology created a cloud-based capability to increase automation, drive efficiency and better serve the CIA's mission.

This capability, deemed the Operational Excellence Cloud, is a private cloud consisting of enterprise server, storage, networking, and software components. Significant capacity is also available to host in-house mission applications and services. In the event that rapid, unplanned mission growth demands the provision of increased capacity levels, additional capacity modules can be added to the cloud on module, rack, container, and data center levels – flexibly and without requiring downtime for the existing infrastructure. Hunt and his team are the chief evangelists leading the paradigm-shifting move to an enterprise based on private (on premise) cloud technology.

The Operational Excellence Cloud program is designed to enable sharing processes, people, and common infrastructure – thereby significantly reducing costs. The program is designed to keep critical communication and collaboration platforms up to date and help ensure that agency and intelligence community users have the latest technology at no additional licensing charge – without the IT burden of downtime for upgrades. The Operational Excellence Cloud offers best-in-class enterprise IT services while lowering the environmental impact by pooling resources across organizational boundaries and assigning and reassigning them dynamically according to demand. The Operational Excellence Cloud program impact on data centers is designed to optimize resources and minimize energy consumption.

Federal organizations are concluding that their existing IT solutions no longer effectively evolve with mission trends and drain precious resources simply to maintain status quo. These organizations are now considering investing in modern, agile cloud platforms to lower operations costs and complexity, while increasing productivity and innovation. The Operational Excellence Cloud program had the foresight to lead the community in making this investment.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) completed an independent review of its Modernization Program in 2009. This review recommended CBP consolidate and virtualize the Automated Commercial Environment (ACE) data center infrastructure as a means to improve performance, increase resource utilization, and reduce costs. In response to this recommendation, CBP's Office of Information and Technology (OIT) developed and began executing a four-phased ACE infrastructure consolidation strategy in 2010.

The consolidation strategy was broken into four phases to ensure a smooth implementation:

• Phase 1: Build a consolidated non-production infrastructure at CBP's National Data Center to consolidate ACE test and development functions
• Phase 2: Integrate ACE development functions in the consolidated non-production infrastructure
• Phase 3: Build a consolidated production infrastructure at Department of Homeland Security Data Center Two
• Phase 4: Consolidate ACE Disaster Recovery functions at Department of Homeland Security Data Center One

The ACE infrastructure consolidation project, under the leadership of those mentioned above, demonstrates a sincere commitment by CBP to achieve Federal and DHS goals for data center consolidation. It also demonstrates CBP's intentions to drive substantial efficiencies in its IT operations during a time of increasing expectations on IT services but declining IT budgets. CBP leveraged best practices to implement infrastructure characteristics for ACE to help achieve specific goals and metrics.

ACE is delivering on the goals of its consolidation strategy. CBP reduced ACE physical footprint by 3,475 square feet. CBP estimates 7,500 square feet (90 percent) in total net reduction at completion in 2013. CBP also reduced ACE infrastructure power requirements by ~320kW. CBP estimates 850kW (65 percent) in total net reduction at completion in 2013. CBP saw additional reductions in the annual ACE infrastructure operations and maintenance costs by ~$23M. CBP estimates about $42 million (40 percent) in total net reduction at completion in 2013.

CBP successfully reduced infrastructure operations costs through data center consolidation without impacting services to customers or staff in the field. CBP simplified the infrastructure by virtualizing physical environments, which makes infrastructure easier to maintain and allows staff to allocate more effort to supporting the implementation of new mission capabilities.

The objective of the Data Center Consolidation project at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is to coordinate, oversee, and streamline the provision of services and facilities for the collocation and consolidation of numerous computing facilities that currently support DHS components and its critical missions. The project's strategic vision is to consolidate the systems and operations currently residing at 43 primary legacy data centers and multiple smaller sites into two Enterprise Data Centers (EDC). These two EDCs provide DHS with a secure, geographically diverse computing environment and minimized overall investment in IT infrastructure, while enhancing disaster recovery and the cybersecurity posture of DHS.

When consolidation is complete, based on current funding levels, DHS expects to realize cumulative savings and cost avoidance of $2.8B through FY 2030. While cost savings is a primary long-term goal, of equal importance are improvements in functionality, physical security, information assurance, and performance enhancements, such as increased network bandwidth and more uptime for users. Consolidation efforts have also significantly enhanced the disaster recovery and continuity posture of each project/system and improved the resiliency of the DHS IT infrastructure.

As of April 2012, 11 of the 43 primary legacy data center sites were successfully consolidated to the EDC, with an additional four sites scheduled to consolidate this fiscal year. Also this past year, Homeland Secure Data Network moved primary systems to Data Center One (DC1) and backup systems to Data Center Two (DC2). DHS now has enterprise-level secure data capabilities at both EDCs, significantly mitigating the risk of catastrophic system impact.

DHS' efforts led to several business innovations across the department, including funding and procurement efficiencies as well as more effective vendor coordination. By leveraging the consolidation effort as an opportunity to consolidate and upgrade systems and move toward establishing the DHS Private Cloud, DHS was able to increase operational efficiencies.

While seeking best practices from other consolidation efforts, DHS found itself to be a leader in the Federal data center consolidation effort, with the DHS OCIO as co-chair of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI). When FDCCI began, DHS was in the midst of consolidating its IT infrastructure and found itself in the position as a pioneer, providing lessons learned and best practices for the benefit of other agencies. DHS shares and coordinates with government and private sector IT communities in seeking the best solutions for the effective, efficient, and secure operations of its IT infrastructure.