Industry Perspective

This report explores the four key elements that will lead to a successful data center transformation. It analyzes governance, project management, systems engineering, and management of change as essential parts of successfully maximizing the benefits of data center transformation.

This report is a resource for Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative planning and executing. It outlines a framework and specific solutions for consolidating data center facilities that are intended to efficiently use available resources and provide strategic, multifunctional value.

This report provides government leaders with the top ten technology trends that are expected to impact their constituents and organizations over the next 18 to 36 months. This report discusses IT trends driving the entire industry and presents a Federal perspective based on the distinct challenges and opportunities faced by the Federal government.

This report leverages changes in work, workers, workplaces, processes, and technologies. It supports shared services, workplace flexibility, and scalable, on-demand capabilities.

This report analyzes the financial impact of IT downtime and data recovery. During periods of downtime business-critical systems are interrupted, leading to a significant reduction in the ability of a company to generate revenue. The financial losses associated with IT outages quickly escalate the longer businesses take to fix them.

This report analyzes the hidden forms of damage to businesses as a result of IT downtime. For example, it is clear that the interruption of business-critical systems from IT downtime leads to a drop in productivity of the staff affected. But downtime can also damage companies' reputations, staff morale, and customer loyalty.

Unfortunately, IT consolidation benefits don't come for free; without the right knowledge, planning, implementation, and visibility, consolidation can cause more problems than it solves, especially for remote and mobile users. To overcome these problems, IT managers can't rely on guesswork or an assortment of point tools. It is important to proceed with knowledge, data, metrics, and visibility throughout every IT consolidation project.

In short, cloud computing refers to a convergence of technologies and trends that are making IT infrastructures and applications more dynamic, more modular, and more consumable. This whitepaper aims to make sense of it all for audiences that haven't been deeply involved in the details of cloud computing as it has rapidly evolved. It lays out the characteristics of a cloud computing infrastructure, describes the forms that cloud computing can take, and outlines how different types of technology providers and consumers of technology relate to each other.

In this white paper, we focus on some key parts of the foundation that underpins cloud computing. These include the interfaces needed to provide applications with a consistent and portable environment even though they no longer live and die on a specific physical server or maybe even a specific datacenter. Quality-of-service and scalability features ensure that business applications get the performance they need even though they no longer run on dedicated hardware.

IT consolidation projects allow civilian, military and intelligence organizations to reduce the number of data centers to cut costs, promote green IT, increase security posture, shift IT funds to more efficient computing platforms, and boost productivity. The trick is to consolidate without hurting performance for government employees and war-fighters.

Many have heard the phrase "perfect storm" from the best-selling 1997 book by Sebastian Junger. It has since been used to refer to times when a particular combination of events cumulate in an utterly unique situation - one in which the whole is significantly greater than the sum of the parts that created it. The IT world is facing such a situation now.