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Federal IT: Seeking Innovation from the Software-Defined Enterprise
Federal IT is severely constrained by their existing IT environment, making it difficult to innovate. $62 billion — 79 percent — of Federal IT budgets is spent updating and maintaining legacy IT systems. A report by MeriTalk concludes that this current model is ‘unsustainable’. IT is bogged down by tight budgets, security worries, agency politics, complex procurement, and existing legacy vendor contracts.
The breakdown of the 79 percent spending on legacy operations is as follows:
- 29 percent on legacy data center hardware and software
- 25 percent on traditional storage environments
- 25 percent on legacy enterprise networks
Lynn Martin, Vice President at VMware, said that “with current budget constraints and continued demand for new and better services, we need to transform the current ratio of maintenance to innovation in Federal IT.”
81 percent of federal agency IT groups said that innovation is vital to their future and 66 percent thought that moving to a software-defined enterprise could ease many of their current woes. For example, 53 percent of federal IT groups said that a software-defined data center will help them reduce costs. 41 percent said that it should improve performance too.
To improve operational efficiency, many organizations are already transitioning to a more software-defined IT infrastructure:
- 66 percent are adopting software-defined data centers
- 59 percent are adopting software-defined storage
- 55 percent are adopting software-defined networking
Steve O’Keeffe, founder of MeriTalk, said that “technology is changing faster than our ability to manage it – and definitely faster than physical equipment can keep up. Software-defined data centers will enable government to create and deploy newer, better, faster applications, without replacing infrastructure. We are freeing IT from IT.”
