Federal Data Center Optimization Shows Varied Progress According to GAO

FITARA legislation instructed GAO to annually report on DCOI progress. In early March, GAO released its most recent assessment of agency advancement toward data center consolidation, and progress toward OMB’s data center optimization targets.

GAO analyzed the progress of 24 federal agencies and found that they closed 96 data centers in FY 2020 and 51 as of August 2021, with planned closures of another 29 data centers before the end of the fiscal year. GAO found agencies saved $875M in FY 2020 due to optimization efforts and $336M for FY 2021 as of the time of the study.

Interestingly, the statistics agencies reported to GAO for this annual review differ from those published on the ITDashboard in December 2021. See below for the differences in reported closures and cost savings for FY 2020 and FY 2021.

The data available on the ITDashboard as of the beginning of December 2021 showed only 66 data center closures for FY 2020 versus 96 reported by GAO. Additionally, the ITDashboard only showed cost savings of $174M for that same year versus the $875M cited by GAO.

Nevertheless as reported in my December blog regarding DCOI progress, agencies show marginal continued progress shuttering, consolidating, and realizing cost saving from federal data center optimization efforts.  

In its report, GAO concluded that closures and savings would slow in the future based on agencies’ DCOI strategic plans. It found that seven agencies planned to close 83 data centers between FY 2022 and FY 2025 resulting in cost savings of only $46M.

In fact, in December 2021, all agencies received “A” grades for data center consolidation on the 13.0 FITARA scorecard. The data center consolidation category will be removed from the next iteration of the scorecard. 

In addition, agencies show varied progress toward other optimization metrics as reported by GAO. For example, twelve agencies met their virtualization and energy metering metrics, sixteen met their availability metric, and thirteen met their server utilization metric. In each of these categories, the metrics were not applicable for seven different agencies. According to GAO, agencies did not meet targets for reasons such as technical and budget constraints.

GAO advises agencies to address GAO open recommendations. Since 2016, GAO has made 126 recommendations, and agencies have closed or implemented 101 of them.  GAO recommends addressing the remaining 25.  GAO did not list the specific recommendations in this recent report.

Although the DCOI effort has lost some momentum, federal contractors should continue to find areas to assist agencies with data center optimization and consolidation. Agencies continue to need assistance with application rationalization, infrastructure modernization, cloud migration, and shared service migration.