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FITARA and the updated Federal data center policy (the Federal Data Center Optimization Initiative) announced this month a push for agencies to modernize. CIOs are searching for the right path forward as they face new deadlines to reduce data center infrastructure and costs –dealing with a massive data growth at the same time. And, it’s no coincidence that OMB has replaced the word “consolidation” with “optimization.” This is exactly right and reflects what we’ve learned over the past few years. We have to take the right modernization steps before we can meet consolidation goals. We know that 80% of our budget is spent maintaining outdated legacy systems. To change that equation, agencies need “transformative” technologies – solutions that provide users with efficiency, simplicity, and speed – enabling agencies to save time, money, and ultimately improve, or transform, current operations. Takeaways – Evolving Government with Transformative Technologies I recently spoke on the “Evolving Government Operations with Transformative Technologies” panel at the Cloudera Government Forum. We discussed the steps agencies are taking as they work to build the modern data center, and how they make best use of their information assets to support their varied missions. Lori Walsh, Assistant Director, at the Center for Risk and Quantitative Analysis, Division of Enforcement, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, discussed the next big steps in transformative technologies for data analytics. She noted that some agencies may have a tremendous amount of unstructured data, and transformative technologies would help summarize the content of various documents in a way that makes it easy to focus in on what the user should be looking at. Another big step in innovation will be the application of current breakthroughs. At EMC, we believe three areas stand out as transformative technologies – hybrid cloud, data lakes, and flash storage. Each of these technologies are having a significant impact on Federal IT and will help to transform the modern data center. First, Federal IT teams today recognize that cloud is not a “one size fits all” solution. A combination of on-premise and off-premise cloud solutions typically works best – a hybrid cloud environment. And, in a recent IDC study of IT and business executives across industries, 96% say their hybrid cloud initiatives are delivering measurable results. Feds have found they have the same data ownership and governance issues in the cloud that they have in their own data centers, and they are learning that preparing for the move to cloud is key to success. They must determine what they are trying to accomplish, and what their use cases and requirements are – with privacy and security being the foundation for success. The second transformative technology is the Data Lake. Data Lakes break down data siloes and bring together multiple types of sources – both structured and unstructured data – in a multi-protocol, multi-access collaborative environment. They enable Big Data analytics across the enterprise, and lead to real innovation. And, supporting all data-intensive environments, EMC recently announced “Rack-Scale Flash” – a brand new category of flash storage enabling near real-time streaming analytics, and paving the way for future real-time applications processing. Rack-Scale Flash combines network shared storage with direct attached storage (DAS) in a single environment. With this new level of flash storage, agencies can seamlessly run mission critical applications at a speed and a price point unimaginable in the recent past. For more information on EMC’s Rack-Scale Flash announcement, check out Barry Morris’ recent blog post on the topic. Author information |
