Data Centers Aren’t Shrinking, but Responsibility is Shifting [#Infographic]
Data centers are shrinking, but data is growing. The federal government is faced with the difficult challenge of saving money on storage while the amount of data continues to grow rapidly. According to Natascha Gutmans Weisbrot, that might not be as incongruous as it sounds:
According to the OMB, infrastructure accounting for about one quarter of the federal government’s $80 billion dollar per year IT budget could be moved to the cloud as part of its cloud-first policy, resulting in gains in robustness, flexibility, and cost savings.
A big reason for that last point, cost-effectiveness, has to do with deployment time, which can be dramatically reduced when extra on-premise hardware and software aren’t involved in the equation. When software becomes a service and hardware becomes a near non-issue, governmental agencies free up more of their resources to focus on their core missions.
Read OMB Releases Cloud Computing Strategy on Samanage.
Cloud scalability is so much more efficient than on-site storage that agencies are much more likely to save money by moving. It means that governments won’t have the direct responsibility of maintaining the hardware needed to store its data, but vendors will need to step up. According to the infographic below, there is more than one exabyte of data stored in the cloud. That’s equal to more than one billion gigabytes of data. Learn more about cloud computing in the government.
