Why Agencies Cling to Outdated Data Centers

Although federal agencies have made significant progress in closing and modernizing their data centers, only six of the 24 Chief Financial Officers Act agencies have achieved their data center closure goals, according to the federal IT Dashboard. 

That makes sense in light of a recently released MeriTalk report, “Infrastructure Psychology: Overvaluing Outdated Data Centers,” based on a survey of 215 government and industry IT decision-makers registered for the AWS Public Sector Summit last June. 

According to the survey, nearly 3 in 4 respondents (74 percent) say their agency “holds onto outdated data centers longer than they should.” Meanwhile, more than half (62 percent) say their agency “needs to make more effective data center migration decisions.” 

There are a wide range of reasons that agencies seem to be clinging to outdated data center technology. Just 32 percent of agencies have formally assessed the value of their data centers in the past year (compared to 49 percent of industry respondents). 

Federal IT pros provided many reasons for sticking with outdated data centers. Those include that “it will be too expensive” to change (51 percent), that they “need to keep essential data/processes under our control” (46 percent), and that “it will take too long to migrate” (41 percent). 

There are several key elements that come into play when IT pros are assessing data center value. Those include the amount of mission-critical data/systems contained (72 percent), cost of data storage equipment (65 percent), and server utilization rates (56 percent).