Avoidance of costs aim of government data centre strategy

Presenting at the Gartner Data Centre Summit yesterday, the Acting Australian Government Chief Information Officer, John Sheridan, said the government’s data centre strategy 2010 to 2025 goal was to avoid $1 billion of costs.

Sheridan went out of his way to stipulate that this was not savings and the costs avoided would end up in general revenue where the money could be used to fund other projects which might include IT projects. Cost avoidance will be brought about by a number of agencies sharing data centre services so the same old repetitive processes are streamlined and each agency does not have to reinvent the wheel each time it needs data centre resources.

Until recently, the provision of data centre services has been ad hoc. Sheridan made some wonderful analogies about space for IT. In the old days it was any space where none of the servers were connected, then it moved to no space where servers were poked away in any spare cupboard and progressed to my space where there was an attempt to get the servers under control, but IT kept on growing and growing. We are now at the stage of our space where there is a notion of that is where we keep our data so Federal IT data is spread all over Canberra and this is not good enough anymore.

The next step is shared services and this is where the cost avoidance of $1 billion will come to fruition. Agencies will converge to get a better arrangement. “This is not a train smash, it’s convergence and is a carefully thought out strategy that agencies, vendors, partners and the CIO committee comprising the CIOs of all the big agencies plus advisers from organisations like Gartner have agreed on before taking it to government to get a mandate to move forward,” said Sheridan.

Already the government has chalked up successes - when 9 out of 12 agencies’ leases came due, a total of $7 million has been saved. As well, servers were underutilised at 30% and now this has now doubled to 60%.

By Merri Mack