Government DCs Undergoing A Major Shift: IDC

IDC Government Insights has unveiled a new report, “Technology Selection: The Government Datacenter of the Future,” that explores how government datacentres are undergoing a once-in-a-generation shift, triggered by the rapid emergence of several key IT disrupters, ranging from growth of mobile devices to the rise of quality cloud services. In addition, a separate set of catalysts have come from government organisations such as the Federal CIO Council, which has set specific targets for system consolidation and movement toward cloud services. This report also investigates how datacentre buildings are migrating toward locations where real estate prices and the costs of electricity are lower, with systems designed to maximise passive cooling and heating and equipped with new types of modular, hot-swappable hardware.

The end result of all of these changes is that government datacentres are entering a period of radical change. To help government CIOs and IT managers navigate this change, the new report focuses on both the near- and long-term future of government datacentres. To accurately address this topic, the report also provides an examination of the current state of government IT infrastructure, including an evaluation of how multiple current trends influence the long-term design and functionality of future government IT facilities. The report concludes with a call to action to help government CIOs and IT managers.

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“Changes are very iterative and they can take years to unfold, depending on the budgets and preferences of individual agencies. But the long term trends are highly apparent, and IT managers are advised to familiarise themselves with how datacenters are evolving, in order to take advantage of important new resources,” said Shawn McCarthy, Research Director, IDC Government Insights.

Datacentre Trends – The Next Evolution

Government datacentres, and the agencies they serve, face a series of important IT decisions over the next two years. Today, agencies are reacting to their own internal budget limits and information technology needs, prompting many to look for cloud-based solutions that will allow them to stop providing some types of IT services (email, storage and backup, Web site hosting) and get these from cloud providers instead.

Some states are offering hosted solutions to which counties and cities can subscribe. This allows the state governments to serve as cloud providers, and it allows local governments the chance to drop certain IT services from their locally hosted (and maintained) solutions.

All of these influences together are prompting government agencies to rethink how they are structuring their data services and the associated facilities they use to host their IT solutions. As a result, government agencies are migrating from a single-stack, siloed approach to more integrated shared services. In fact, in the United States, IDC expects spending on public cloud services to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 18.5 percent through 2016, which is about four times faster than direct spending on IT infrastructure hardware and software.

Additional Key Report Findings Include:

• Fewer dedicated datacentres, but the remaining facilities will be quite large, serving multiple customers.

• The buildings themselves will be located in regions where real estate prices and the costs of electricity are lower, and they will be designed to maximise passive cooling and heating.

• Hardware will be increasingly rack based, hot-swappable, progressively powerful and standardised, and designed to support heavily virtualised software.

• Software solutions will consolidate around specific business functions, with organisations making those functions available as hundreds of discreet services that can be tapped into, via the cloud, by multiple applications and multiple agencies.

• Energy efficiency will be boosted greatly while tapping into alternative energy resources such as wind, solar, nuclear, wave energy, and geothermal solutions.

“The end result of this evolution will be fewer dedicated government datacentres,” continued McCarthy. “But the remaining facilities will be quite large, serving multiple customers.”