Nearly a decade ago, in May of 2013, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s Subcommittee on Government Operations conducted a field hearing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., to address the Federal government’s ongoing efforts to consolidate data centers and optimize cloud adoption. […]
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Kevin Kampschroer, chief sustainability officer and director of the Office of Federal High-Performance Green Buildings at the General Services Administration (GSA), cited the ambitious clean-energy targets of big tech-sector companies as encouragement that the Federal government can meet White House clean-energy goals, including through more efficient data center usage. […]
Danielle Metz, deputy CIO for information enterprise in the Defense Department’s (DoD) CIO Office, said the Pentagon is nearing completion of a plan launched in 2018 to migrate nearly 1,000 systems to cloud-based services and shutter another 60 data centers. […]
Security is essential for organizations that rely on data centers. However, a new white paper from Data Centre Dynamics says that many organizations don’t understand that the most pervasive threats may come from where they least expect them. […]
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is seeking vendors to provide engineering and technical capabilities to help manage the bureau’s critical data centers across five U.S. locations. At the same time, the FBI’s Data Center Hardware and Operating Systems Section (DCHOSS) is developing a Government-Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) for IT Professional Engineering Services to support this effort. […]
The FBI is in search of a contractor that will offer technical expertise and personnel to support the agency’s data centers and key sites of IT operations, according to a June 7 request for information (RFI). […]
A 2019 tweak by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to the definition of a data center – and thus how the Federal government proceeds with its Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) aimed at sharply cutting the number of data centers that Federal agencies operate – is having the effect of leaving the government more vulnerable to cyberattacks, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) official concurred today. […]
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) made three new recommendations to the agency on improving its cloud adoption, data center migration, and legacy IT oversight efforts in a new report released August 10. […]
Reps. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Joe Kennedy III, D-Mass., introduced the We Need Eviction Data Now Act (H.R. 7743) on July 23 to direct the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to create a database of eviction records. […]
The Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service is seeking a third-party provider for data center colocation services, per a July 23 request for information (RFI). […]
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) released a solicitation request for IT support for an existing data center and a new disaster recovery center. […]
Charles Chen, director of the AI and Emerging Technology Office at the Department of State, said at the June 30 AI in Action webcast that data lakes are “certainly essential for the success of machine learning and AI.” […]
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a report issued today that most of the largest Federal agencies made good progress in meeting goals to close data centers in Fiscal Year 2019, but also recommended that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) take several steps to improve clarity of reporting on data center closures under OMB’s Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) issued in 2016 and modified last year. […]
Focusing on the “compute” equation – instead of only prioritizing data center closures – is an important consideration in Federal agencies’ execution of the Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI), General Services Administration (GSA) Senior Adviser Stephen Naumann explained at a Dec. 18 ACT-IAC meeting. […]
With Department of Homeland Security (DHS) looking to close its Data Center 2 (DC2) by June 2020, DHS Infrastructure Services Division Executive Director Carlene Ileto provided progress updates indicating that most DHS components are in the process of or planning to move their data to the cloud by the DC2 closure deadline. […]
Dr. Tom Leighton, chief executive officer of cloud service provider Akamai, said Thursday that data center defense on its own is woefully inadequate to handle capacity available at the edge of the network to launch distributed attacks. […]
The Federal government has a massive data center footprint: 6.76 million square feet, to be precise. Of its total portfolio, an astonishing 62 percent of all floor center space goes unused. To add insult to injury, it’s extremely expensive to maintain all that unused space. […]
In a move that will help save the Federal government $695 million over the next 10 years, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is “reshaping and reorganizing [its] Computing Ecosystem.” The first part of the reorganization is shuttering the doors of its St. Louis data center. […]
Cloud computing is now powering the next generation of technology–from artificial intelligence (AI) to Internet of Things (IoT) to machine learning, offering government agencies scalability and agility to support and analyze a massive influx of data for more informed decision making. […]
The Social Security Administration (SSA) continues to modernize its information technology systems, re-awarding Northrop Grumman a 10-year Information Technology Support Services (ITSS) contract. SSA and Northrop Grumman have worked together for nearly a decade, so the global security firm is familiar with the agency’s needs and concerns. […]
MeriTalk compiles a weekly roundup of contracts and other industry activity. Here’s what happened this week in the Federal Information Technology community. […]
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration will probably make the 2018 deadline to optimize its data centers, according to Karen Petraska, program executive for computing services at NASA. […]
MeriTalk sat down with Deloitte’s managing director of Federal technology strategy and architecture Doug Bourgeois to discuss data center optimization strategies and how agencies can better take advantage of private sector expertise. […]
Civil servants who create complex regulations are often their own worst enemy, according to Joe Paiva, chief information officer of the International Trade Administration. […]
The deadline for Federal agencies to close all of their data centers by 2018 will probably be extended for an unspecified amount of time, according to Dave Powner, director of IT issues at the Government Accountability Office. […]
The third largest cloud computing company in the world, OVH, will be investing $47 million to establish its first U.S. data center, and North American headquarters, in Fauquier County, Va. […]
The Defense Department likes to hit its targets. So you can imagine the frustration that the department’s chief information officer, Terry Halvorsen, must have experienced when he realized that he wasn’t even going to come close to reaching the Federal mandate to close at least 40 percent of the department’s data centers by 2015. […]
FITARA Fault Lines My Capitol Hill listening post has picked up several encrypted messages from the Government Accountability Office suggesting that the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act may be widening some major fault lines across government. While the law was designed to strengthen the role of the chief information officer, the Situation Report has […]
Just 11 percent of Federal IT managers say their data centers are fully equipped to meet their agency’s current mission demands, according to a report by MeriTalk. The report, titled “Flash Forward–The Future of the Federal Data Center” and underwritten by Pure Storage, asked 150 Federal IT/data center professionals to predict and examine the future […]
The Government Accountability Office has charged 24 Federal agencies with consolidating data centers, but it seems their progress is too slow, according to a new report. […]