According to U.S. Representative Will Hurd (R-Texas), Chairman of the House Information Technology Subcommittee, “The federal government spends $80 billion each year on IT systems and 80 percent of which is spent maintaining outdated, legacy systems. Our government needs to be able to introduce cutting edge technology into their networks to improve operational efficiency and decrease operational cost.”
To address this wasteful spending, Hurd introduced the Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act. The MGT Act is legislation that will make Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) more attractive and affordable to Government CIOs, and accelerate the adoption of modern IT infrastructure. The bill essentially allows government agencies to “bank” the savings they realize from replacing legacy systems with more efficient, modern technology. The savings can be placed into a fund from which they can draw to finance further modernization programs.
This legislation encourages Federal CIOs to reduce wasteful spending; and, by upgrading old systems, strengthen IT security while eliminating the “use it or lose it” constraints they’ve been subjected to for years. More importantly, this will save taxpayers billions of dollars, while making information more secure.
The MGT Act just makes good sense. Instead of the cost savings being assimilated back into other government budgets and filtered into “pork-barrel” spending, the funds sit in an account for use by the agency that realized the savings — to continue upgrading IT systems. Unlike government spending that never seems to produce results or have an end for example the top of the pork-barrel project for 2016:
- DDG-51 Arleigh-Burke Class Destroyer. At a cost of $1 billion for a single ship. There was a demand that the Pentagon acquire another destroyer — one not requested by Defense officials — stands as the single largest item on this year’s list. If Defense officials don’t need it, who does?
The MGT Act rewards CIOs and thus, has a trickledown effect of producing better optimized data centers (energy savings) that have stronger protection against hackers. Best of all, this gives federal agencies the funding mechanism they need to produce the quantifiable savings required by the DCOI mandate to be achieved by the end of fiscal 2018.
A Data Center Infrastructure Monitoring (DCIM) tool like Nlyte can help in various ways. With the real-time information that Nlyte supplies, data center operators have a clear view into:
- Equipment that is older and inefficient and should be retired and/or replaced
- Safe consolidation and migration
- Monitoring and optimizing of energy consumption
- Strategic capacity planning
- Reports on cost savings
With DCIM and the new MGT Act, Government Data Centers are one step closer to the efficiency goals of the DCOI. DCIM can not only help data center managers understand their facility, but plan changes, predict outcomes, execute the plans, and then report on them.
On May 2, HR 2227, the MGT Act cleared the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee with unanimous support and no amendments. On May 17, the bill passed the House floor vote. The next stop in its journey is the Senate. We can only hope that this sensible piece of legislation continues to be approved to the benefit of tax spending, environmental impact, and the nation’s security.
The post New Legislation Makes Data Center Optimization Initiative Even More Attractive appeared first on Nlyte.
Source: Nlyte
According to U.S. Representative Will Hurd (R-Texas), Chairman of the House Information Technology Subcommittee, “The federal government spends $80 billion each year on IT systems and 80 percent of which is spent maintaining outdated, legacy systems. Our government needs to be able to introduce cutting edge technology into their networks to improve operational efficiency and decrease operational cost.” To address this wasteful spending, Hurd introduced the Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act. The MGT Act is legislation that will make Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) more attractive and affordable to Government CIOs, and accelerate the adoption of modern IT infrastructure. The bill essentially allows government agencies to “bank” the savings they realize from replacing legacy systems with more efficient, modern technology. The savings can be placed into a fund from which they can draw to finance further modernization programs. This legislation encourages Federal CIOs to reduce wasteful spending; and, by upgrading…