Under the cooperative effort between the GSA’s Office of Government-wide Policy (OGP) and Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Data Center Optimization Initiative will help federal agencies to develop and report on existing data center strategies, develop consolidation strategies, and ultimately transition to improved cost savings and more efficient infrastructure.
“GSA welcomes the opportunity to support OMB in its efforts to achieve government-wide data center optimization,” GSA Administrator Denise Roth said in a press release. “To champion agency efforts to modernize and optimize their data centers, we're building a robust shared services marketplace. The marketplace will ensure an even playing field for customers to learn about and negotiate services with providers.”
Efforts to optimize government data centers on the part of the OGP have included such things as infrastructure assessment tools, planning tools to help agencies access shared services through interagency collaborations and providing guidance for cloud services, to name a few.
The activity is in line with the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act, which was signed by President Barack Obama in December 2014. The act required the Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer to create goals for data center optimization cost savings, provide progress reports on the affected agencies and review data center inventories.