This blog post is an excerpt from GovLoop’s market trends report “Data Center as-a-Service: The Gateway to Rapid IT Modernization.” Download the full report here.
To balance the demands of uninterrupted mission services with the need to update legacy technologies, agencies need a path forward that involves an as-a-Service approach.
This IT business model will enable them to streamline delivery of capabilities and technology and reduce costs. More specifically, the benefits that come with Data Center as-a-Service (DCaaS) can help accelerate federal agencies’ objectives of freeing up IT resources to focus on strategic initiatives, capturing all their operating expenses and standing up and optimizing mission-critical applications in a timely manner.
Here are five best practices to make the most of DCaaS to accelerate IT modernization:
1. Modernize your data center
Familiarize your customers and IT staff with new technologies that will help them manage resources and workloads more effectively. Those solutions include virtualization and cloud technologies, and services that enable your agency to better manage, monitor and deploy necessary resources, whether they’re more storage or computing power.
2. Increase performance and drive innovation
Take advantage of the speed and innovation that DCaaS provides to address your agency’s mission objectives faster. Investing in DCaaS frees you to more easily move applications to different environments, such as public or private clouds. Having this flexibility allows your agency to better track the cost of running applications and their location. DCaaS gives agencies more options for managing their workloads in a way that best serves citizens.
3. Dramatically reduce downtime
DCaaS simplifies and accelerates the process for deploying new technologies in your data center, which leads to far less downtime. The nature of how these technologies operate changes the response to downtime for maintenance or unscheduled outages. If a disruption occurs, the natural protections that are built into the technologies allow these workloads to continue to run, which means you’re less dependent on any one technology or system.
4. Reduce your Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
When considering an investment in DCaaS, examine the total cost of owning and operating your current data centers. That includes acquisition costs for buying new technologies and operations and maintenance costs. Reviewing this data will give you a better understanding of what your agency spends on IT and potential savings from moving to a DCaaS model. Some of those savings will come from reducing your data center footprint and promoting energy efficiency. Under the MGT Act, agencies can funnel those savings into working capital funds to cover the costs of future IT modernization projects.
5. Partner with an experienced industry adviser
A trusted industry partner can help you understand what aspects of data center modernization could benefit you the most and the soonest. For example, how will DCaaS help your agency meet overall IT modernization goals and align with requirements in the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act? Do the economics of cloud make sense for applications and systems? These are the types of questions that you and your industry partner can explore together.
