US Government Begins Largest IT Consolidation in History 283
miller60 writes "Saying 1,100 data centers is too many, the federal government has begun what looms as the largest IT consolidation in history. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has directed federal agencies to inventory their assets by April 30 and prepare a plan to reduce the number of servers and data centers, with a focus on slashing energy costs (full memo). Kundra says some applications may be shifted to cloud computing platforms customized for government use."
... if you can spell "Cloud Computing" (Score:5, Insightful)
I predict a rash of job openings that you can get hired for provided you can spell "Cloud Computing"
Re:... if you can spell "Cloud Computing" (Score:4, Funny)
Clud Crumpooting
Re:... if you can spell "Cloud Computing" (Score:4, Funny)
It depends entirely on the political clout of your congressional representation.
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So you're saying it's really more 'clout computing?'
I'm so totally using that. *yoink*
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C-L-U-O-D C-M-P-U-T-E-N-G.
Is that close enough for government work?
Re:... if you can spell "Cloud Computing" (Score:4, Funny)
Nor to know how to pronounce corpsman [youtube.com] (hint:not corpse-man)
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40, 50, or 60 years ago, there were indeed pronounced accents in the United States. Sometimes, crossing a state line meant everyone sounded quite different. Today? Come on - damned near no one speaks with a pronounced accent. Just a bit of a drawl here, some slurring there - nothing that accounts for nuke-you-lar physics.
I always liked this song - especially the line, "Learned to talk like the man on the six o'clock news" at about 2:40
When I was in junior high school, a teacher from out of state told us
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Ooops. Forgot the link to the song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzGx_XzxDeM# [youtube.com]
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Re:... if you can spell "Cloud Computing" (Score:4, Insightful)
Pride in your origins ? You were born. Whoop-tee-doo! One person's birth doesn't make an arbitrary geopolitical territory automagically awesomer than the one next to it.
If we're going to take the gloves off, I'll posit that the entirety of "American English" is ignorant, as it is an inferior, jocular, slurred dialect that only loosely resembles English syntax. It is to English what Afrikaans is to Dutch.
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When? I'm interested if you can rectify your statement with the Andrew Jackson presidency. (also the antebellum presidents were, without exception, hacks, most of the reconstruction presidents were corrupt, then you've got the racist Woodrow Wilson, the oblivious Herbert Hoover, and more recently tricky Dick and our good friend W.)
We've been luck
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You could forgive Bush for this if he at least took the time to learn to pronounce it before using it in his speeches. Or maybe even after mutilating the word the first time. But he didn't.
It would be like the CEO of Intel saying "sillycone" instead of silicon in presentations at multiple conferences.
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Perhaps you should pay some attention to your Spam folder... I believe there are messages in there from people willing to sell you vallium, which you clearly need.
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That doesn't preclude him from being stupid.
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MISSION: The Coffee Party Movement gives voice to Americans who want to see cooperation in government. We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans. As voters and grassroots volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them.
We are 100% grassroots. No lobbyi
You forgot Reagan and Bush 1 (Score:2)
You forgot Reagan and Bush 1. Yet you mention Carter who did not do as much as any of the other recent ones.
Obama has just gotten started and is not on their level yet. The bailout wasn't on his watch (and is largely payed back no thanks to Bush and Republicans who never wanted the bailout money back... or ANY measure to prevent a repeat kissing bankster ass to the extreme. except ron paul and his hopeless move to audit the fed.)
Nixon. (Score:2, Insightful)
Nixon did immeasurable harm; we are still feeling the damage today. HMOs, bad food, family farms dying, rise of GM food; and going off the gold standard to the oil dollar standard; putting us at the mercy of OPEC... Starting of trade with China for the purposes that came to fruition later; don't think for a second that wasn't the intention. it was.
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Nixon took us off the gold standard during the Civil War? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard#Suspension_of_the_gold_standard [wikipedia.org]
THAT BASTARD!
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Don't you know yourself no history? He did it during the Great Depression! [youtube.com]
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family farms dying
Please. Family farms started dying around the end of the 19th century, when mechanization started to make operating a farm a business rather than a family pastime. Various forms of farm subsidies managed to stave off the inevitable decline of "pa and his sons working the farm" for quite some time, but by the 70's, the ride was just plain fucking over. Seriously, in this day of GPS guided multi-hundred-thousand dollar combine harvesters, there simply ain't no efficient way to operate a "family farm". The rea
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Dear Contractors... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dear Contractors... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Dear Contractors... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Dear Contractors... (Score:4, Funny)
Sure, as long as they bring in the free market to do it. Nothing gets a job done on time and under cost like unfettered free enterprise and rugged individualism.
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While we're in irony mode, yup, that's why we have the best health care system in the world, we have the best train infrastructure in the world, and why our scientific and cultural literacy is top-notch!
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And why we have the most imprisoned people per capita in the world! Everyone knows a privately owned prison system is the best way to-
*NO CARRIER*
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But it's impossible for people to end up in jail in a free market! Any time people might need something they don't have, whether it be stuff or emotional fulfillment, a market is created, and the invisible hand provides!
This incidentally is why in a free market nobody is killed by bullets - need to be saved -> market -> invisible hand deflects bullet.
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Re:Dear Contractors... (Score:4, Insightful)
they will have a lean, optimized, efficient operation.
I'm sure that it'll be as lean and efficient as most of the companies where I've worked. While those 'darn government bureaucrats' take a lot of heat for like every one who runs for office, incumbent or not. However, personally, I've seen plenty of waste, fraud and abuse in the private sector to know that those issues are just examples of human nature run amok in large organizations.
Of course with government, special problems exist, in particular voters and politicians who instead of trying to improve government seem more willing to destroy it and 'start fresh'. Of course that that does is empower the status quo. Practical people who talk of incremental change and steady leadership are downed out by radicals who demand 'nothing', or 'everything'.
Re:Dear Contractors... (Score:4, Informative)
And, honestly, I'd be delighted if the feds can realize some of those economies. I'm sure that there are plenty of grossly inefficient little fiefdoms out there, just waiting to be consolidated.
My concern is twofold: one is that there are non-obvious potential diseconomies of scale(and not just because this is the evil gummin't with its waste and corruption, a lot of the good stories are private sector). Centralization and standardization are all well and good until you end up waiting three weeks and submitting petitions in triplicate just to get some software installed or setting changed, and don't even think about setting up a little wiki or git repo or something for your team with approval from a half dozen departments.
The second issue is, of course, concern over the government contracting process, regulatory capture, revolving door incentives, outright corruption, and whatnot. The magical efficiency of the private sector isn't going to do us a whole lot of good if the project ends up as a cost-plus job for SAIC [wikipedia.org] or one of the other byzantine contracting behemoths that specialize in landing(and on occasion even fulfilling) contracts.
Re:Dear Contractors... (Score:5, Informative)
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Bout time (Score:4, Funny)
See, the last time we upgraded we put everything on eleven hundred windows 95 machines with 1 gig hard drives. That did pretty good for a spell, all things considered. Now we're thinking about one of them pointy computers... whaddya call em? Blade servers? Yeah, we hear good things about those.
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See, the last time we upgraded we put everything on eleven hundred windows 95 machines with 1 gig hard drives.
One data center for each machine?! I think you've unfairly misrepresented their efficiency. I think an estimate of 200 total machines would be more appropriate.
Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
This being an IT project, I predict it will take 5 years longer than planned, cost 10x the initial budget, and still never really work quite right.
Fixed that for you.
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Re:Prediction (Score:4, Interesting)
Here is another fun page [ieee.org]: "Most IT experts agree that such failures occur far more often than they should. What's more, the failures are universally unprejudiced: they happen in every country; to large companies and small; in commercial, nonprofit, and governmental organizations; and without regard to status or reputation."
I only question why, when large projects are almost universally over-budget or fail altogether, we persist in being surprised and outraged every time? The simple fact is, we don't know how to do it, any more than we know how to land on mars; that is, we can do it, sometimes, but you better know going in it is likely to end in tears.
(In general, it seems to me that most of the problems in government have direct parallels in private industry because they flow from the same underlying cause; the unaffordability of medicare/medicaid corresponds to skyrocketing premiums in the private market; social security corresponds to slashing pensions and now even 401k matches in private industry. But private industry does hold a trump card - they can always cut their losses by tossing people aside and moving on, whereas government is the safety net.)
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This being a government IT project, I predict it will take 5 years longer than planned, cost 10x the initial budget, and still never really work quite right.
Then it will be a complete success.
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It depends if the idea happened with you/your party supporting or rejecting the idea initially. So if it was your party idea then it is a success otherwise it would be a failure.
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Government: There's no success like failure.
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Unless they outsource it to the FREE MARKET in which case it will be the most efficient, cost-effective solution ever completed six months ahead of schedule.
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Considering that the data being processed is most likely confidential in some way I'm not sure that's an option.
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From what I've observed...there really is NOT much in the way of govt. run tech, they are mandated to only be managers, it is ALL contract work these days. I started some projects with govt. years ago, and there were a few govt tech types doing tech work, but shortly after that, they were mandated to ONLY be mangerial and could not do direct tech work.
So, this is common, and it is no problem.
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I don't know, we started with a network of well over 3,000 servers, and in less than 2 years we've moved almost entirely off Win 2K, virtualized over 1,000 servers, moved to AIX 6 and VIO, delpoyed a VMWare infrastructure, deployed an Exchange architecture in place of a legacy e-mail system, and converted more than half our web apps into SOA and put it on IFLs in a mainframe. We cut from over 3,000 systems, nearly all physical, to under 2500 with near half virtual, and saved significant money in the proces
IT as a commodity (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:IT as a commodity (Score:5, Insightful)
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Stop calling it identity theft.
It as "Banks refusing to take action to prevent fraud".
Re:IT as a commodity (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not quite sure what you are talking about. Because everyone has access to yesteryear's supercomputer on their desktop, there is no reason whatever to go back to a 1960s outsourcing model. If you want to distribute load over your machines, go ahead! But why do it over someone else's?
If you think this is going to reduce IT expenditure requirements, you have barely worked a minute in IT. When you outsource, you are simply paying someone else to do your job, plus profit, plus a gaggle of negotiators in middle management collecting their kickbacks, plus downtime costs because your business is less important to them than your business is to you (if you have enterprise e-mail and it has been down more than, say, GMail, you have done something very wrong)...
Re:IT as a commodity (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think this is going to reduce IT expenditure requirements, you have barely worked a minute in IT. When you outsource, you are simply paying someone else to do your job, plus profit, plus a gaggle of negotiators in middle management collecting their kickbacks, plus downtime costs because your business is less important to them than your business is to you (if you have enterprise e-mail and it has been down more than, say, GMail, you have done something very wrong)...
I've worked in IT for... a few years. And I agree with the GP.
See, the thing is that while huge organisations will continue to require significant IT infrastructure (either managed inhouse or managed by an outside firm), huge organisations do not provide the majority of jobs in this world. The great majority of jobs are provided by SMBs. The really small SMBs have been outsourcing their IT for years - though "outsourcing their IT" probably translates to "get Dave's son to do it, he knows about computers".
Slightly larger SMBs have been outsourcing their IT to some little company who thought they could earn easy money doing installation and support. Look in the yellow pages, you'll find hundreds of little companies offering services like this. Few of these little outsourcing companies are making serious money - there's simply too much competition in the market.
Larger still SMBs (think medium rather than small, 40-200 employees) may have historically had a full-time IT person. But today there are dozens of companies offering outsourced Exchange, or you can sign up for Google for Domains and the price is so cheap that there is no way a single full-time IT person (even if you ignore their salary) can compete economically - never mind offering four or five nines uptime and spam filtering which doesn't leave people crying. Meanwhile, the cost of a single desktop PC is now so low that it's cheaper to have a spares cupboard containing enough spare PCs to re-equip an entire team at a moment's notice than it is to keep someone on staff to maintain them. Sure, they won't be particularly elegantly managed (there may not be a domain, antivirus may be totally forgotten about, they certainly won't have a standardised build) but let's be honest here - how many non-techies ever display any sign of caring about any of that? And business-specific niche software is frequently sold with a support contract anyway.
Seriously - while anyone who takes careers advice from a stranger on /. probably needs their brains looking at, I'd say if you want steady employment with minimal risk of finding that not only are you redundant from your current post, supply and demand has made you worth considerably less since you last were jobhunting - get yourself a job in the public sector or get the hell out of IT.
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Little nit to pick with that... From my perspective it seems like the competent folks quickly reach carrying capacity and simply choose not to expand their operation. I don't know what you mean by "serious money", but having a steady roster of clients who are willing to pay a slight premium for your services doesn't look like a bad way to conduct business.
There may be a lot of compe
Re:IT as a commodity (Score:4, Informative)
However, I don't see that they'd have much to gain by outsourcing. Government data, by nature, is quite a bit more sensitive than just about any private company's data. The kind of security the government needs is not going to come cheaply, and it's arguable that any private company is really capable of providing it (although they say they are). Even if they can provide it, it's doubtful they can do it cheaper than the government could. For people in need of true commodity services like web hosting, outsourcing makes sense because it can be done far cheaper that way. For people in need of large-scale custom solutions, like the government, keeping it in-house is going to tend to be both more secure and less expensive.
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You assume they haven't already outsourced everything already.
From where I'm sitting (in a government IT center, with about 5 actual government employees among the couple thousand that work here), that's not all that likely to be a valid assumption.
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Better not use Northrop Grumman (Score:4, Informative)
If Virginia's IT overhaul [washingtonpost.com] is any indication [timesdispatch.com], this is going to be a slow-motion cluster of a mess [washingtontechnology.com] for the next 10-20 years
Re:Better not use Northrop Grumman (Score:5, Informative)
If Virginia's IT overhaul [washingtonpost.com] is any indication [timesdispatch.com], this is going to be a slow-motion cluster of a mess [washingtontechnology.com] for the next 10-20 years
Let's not forget that Vivek Kundra was Virginia's CIO when that fiasco took place. I predict that this will be at least as bad as the Virginia situation.
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I think you are mistaking him with Anesh Chopra (Chief Technology Officer). I see Kundra (Chief Information Officer) as having been the Secretary of Commerce and Trade for Virgina
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivek_Kundra [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneesh_Chopra [wikipedia.org]
Re:Better not use Northrop Grumman (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course it is
consolidations are always a mess and ones full of job implications mean political interference (I want em in my district).
But you have to do something as the growth of government IT gets out of hand and we can only afford so much.
IIRC, the government consolidated all the payroll systems it had into about 4 pay centers back about 10 years ago. Went from maintaining hundreds to one s/w run 4 places for redundancy. Everybody screamed they needed theirs because it had unique features, they learned to do without or incorporated the features into the new s/w. Wasn't that fairly successful?
While all govt computing is a bit more complex now than a single application was then, still if we are to afford the things we really need, consolidation and standardization makes sense.
Now the contracting and execution...that will be a challenge. And so what if it takes 5 years, if we are going in the right direction and saving money in the long run. Because we can't sustain even the current government spending on what we are willing to vote as taxes.
Consolidate (Score:5, Funny)
Every business I've ever worked for has had that one dusty 8086 off in a corner. It would run a single batch file every few hours. No one would touch it, because no one knew what it did-- just that whatever it did do was mission critical.
Thus, the US government should just consolidate everything down to a single batch program run by a 8086. I'm sure there's a spare closet in the White House or something they can use as a server room.
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I know that as late as 1995, NASA still had some satellites that were still controlled by some Commodore 64s in a warehouse near White Sands, New Mexico.
I'm sure they've fixed that by now. Probably. Possibly.
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*those* satellites are probably now defunct. It's the satellites that launched in the 1990s that are still dependent on running on old Alpha, Sparc or such hardware that are the current problem.
And there's no budget to hire programmers to port all of the software, run it through the proper testing, code review, etc.
So yes, there's a bunch of old systems hidden in closets and/or empty cubicles, limping along until the mission ends.
Disclaimer : I've seen one of those closets, and more than one of the cubicle
TEOTWAWKI.bat ... every 108 minutes (Score:2, Funny)
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TEOTWAWKI.bat ... every 108 minutes
LIAR! That has 9 characters before the extension!
calls the 8.3 police
Memo not clear (Score:2)
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They put the head of DHS in charge of it because DHS wants to make sure they get their monitoring gear in front of all these sites, and the easiest way to make that happen is for DHS to run it. It's the same idea as to why DHS is so heavily involved in the TIC project: they want a specific outcome, but that outcome isn't what's publicly stated.
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Are you referring to processing power, or computer resources? Cause I would think the IRS and Social Security both have a crapload more stuff than the DoE..
So there is Hope for the Secret Service ... (Score:2)
(loc. cit. [go.com])
CC.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yes, no one should earn money, consolidate data, or expend energy reducing their overall energy consumption. You would make a great CIO, what are you doing giving away your insights for free on slashdot?
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I think Vivek wants to make himself look useful after being exposed as a fraud by John C. Dvorak. http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/08/12/special-report-is-us-chief-information-officer-cio-vivek-kundra-a-phony/ [dvorak.org]
So who will make Dvorak look useful after exposing himself as a fraud? [youtube.com]
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
What about "use it or lose it"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't read the article, but my experience with government entities is that they receive a specific value of funding each year to spend on gear, training, energy costs, etc.
The nature of the funding goes that if you don't use all of it this year, you get a reduced amount next year. Now this may seem logical -- it may seem like a policy that governs spending. Instead what it is is a policy that drives UNNECESSARY SPENDING.
The places I have been were frugal but appropriate in their spending throughout the year. As the funding for the year would approach a close (in October), all-of-a-sudden the leadership would start spending money like crazy because they had a large surplus. Money would be spent on things that were not actually necessary; if they were necessary, why not get them at any other time during the year?
In several cases, seeing this strange frenzy of spending I would ask the leadership what was going on. They explained the 'use it or lose it' policy and that in order to maintain the funding they got this year, for next year, they *must* spend it all. I was in conflict because I was taught integrity/honesty and there is no integrity in spending up dads helpful money on worthless junk so as to appear that you still have 'need'.
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The reason I bring this up is because I am curious if the units that will save money via IT consolidation will actually save us money or if they will be (by obvious standing procedure) driven to spend it in pointless/needless ways.
Discuss? Anyone else experience this?
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As the funding for the year would approach a close (in October), all-of-a-sudden the leadership would start spending money like crazy because they had a large surplus. Money would be spent on things that were not actually necessary; if they were necessary, why not get them at any other time during the year?
But, I seriously needed the 12 pairs of sunglasses that I got in October 2006. They were only $200.00 / each and we only bought 12 for 12 different people. When I say we needed them I mean we needed to spend more money! I actually wore a pair this morning.
Nice idea in theory... (Score:4, Interesting)
Now just wait for a data center to be scheduled to close in some Congressman's home district and see how big of a block is put into place.
History to Repeat Itself? (Score:5, Informative)
I have no problem with the CONCEPT of consolidation, but Virginia's IT outsourcing/consolidation project to Northrup Grumman happened on Kundra's watch. It is an unmitigated disaster.
Years into it, there's not even a complete inventory of the systems that NG is supposed to be managing for the Commonwealth, and at least as of a few months ago, NG couldn't even produce an invoice for the Commonwealth to pay that had more than six or eight line items on it.
I sat through a special meeting of the House Committee on Science and Technology on the issue a few months ago, and the legislature is NOT happy about the situation. Privately, you will hear from them words like "gross negligence" to "I'm convinced it's corruption". The Delegates who engineered the legislation enabling the IT outsourcing are especially pissed.
No disrespect to Kundra, but I don't think he's the right guy to oversee it.
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By the government policy of failing upward, he is not only the right guy, he is the only guy! Noone else has failed on a scale to prove they really have what it takes to fail at this and still come out smelling like roses.
Free software and owned infrastructure (Score:3, Interesting)
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But hey, that's the holocost of doing business! ;)
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That has got to be the most nonsensical comment I have read on /. so far. Either that or I just do not get your kind of humour. What does the free market have to do with government transparency? And what has free (as in speech) software to do with socialism and holocausts?
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You've never argued with a libertarian, have you?
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There is no free market, go bitch slap some sense into Ron Paul. Free market in software, hah? Explain MS, please. Free market in drugs? No way are we going to let the drug companies put any magic elixir on the market without adequate FDA approval. Want to put a new vehicle on the road that rolls over at the first gust of wind? Nope. The market is not free and cannot be free if we value survival. Put Paul in your pipe and smoke him if you like, but you are just pissing in the wind.
dang, beat me to it! (Score:2)
I was halfway through the description and intended to make a "Let's move everything to the Cloud!" joke, but I see the OP beat me to it. How disappointing. Let me give you a little tip: the person who sets up the joke isn't supposed to then tell the punchline. C'mon, Abbot and Costello 101 here, people. I don't know! Third base!
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Key phrase: "Budget Authority" (Score:2)
Does CIO Vivek Kundra have budget authority over these data centers? If not, then the agencies will do with him what they do with every other "czar:" Flip him the bird and go right back to the way they were doing things before.
'Nuff said.
Cloud Computing for Governments (Score:2)
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Cloud Computing for Governments ...is such a colossally bad idea. Government data living on any system ultimately controlled by a corporation on that corporation's property is so rife for abuse, we are really opening perhaps the biggest Pandora's box of our times.
Cloud computing != Privately run servers
A push to cloud computing could be moving things to Microsoft created and run server farms, or could be moving things to Google created, but government run and operated server farms, or it could mean moving things to government created and run server farms. Personally, I like the idea of most government agencies just having access to virtual servers in a nice, distributed set of server farms because it solves a lot of networking problems while potentially also getting
Virtualization- (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure I'm seeing some of this where I'm at now. Basically it has become a bad word to suggest you need a "server". There's the hardware cost, operational cost, and then most importantly to those signing the checks - the bureaucracy costs involved with running such.
The push has now become to just acquire a slot on the virtual machines they've started to toss up which has actually worked out damned well. What used to run on two giant racks now runs on one little blade server. Definitely a newer angl
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Virtualization of servers is the right approach to reducing hardware costs and power consumption. We have a facility that currently run on three virtualized server and just because the facility need to have high availability we have an additional blade server that can be fail over in case the primary crashed.
Let the NSA do it (Score:2)
The NSA has 1) the mad hax0r skillz, 2) massive reserves of hidden computer power, and 3) the security chops to actually create a secure U.S. government computing cloud. If they can keep their own codebreaking and intelligence records secure (when was the last time you heard about the NSA getting hacked?), they can do it for the government as a whole.
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Because IT is a pretty damn banal subject, your proposal doesn't elicit the visceral distaste that "Hey, we should let the army take over policing. The army has 1) mad combat skillz 2) massive firepower and 3) the security chops to actually keep the streets safe.
Good idea, but huge problems are coming (Score:5, Interesting)
I've actually done a lot of smaller server consolidation projects. In most cases, the results are great...those lonely database and file servers that get hits 5 or 6 times a day are all combined into one big box that actually uses all the hardware capacity.
The biggest problems I've seen with VMs are the project managers who treat it as magic, never-ending capacity. The new favorite phrase in IT project management circles seems to be, "Oh, we'll just build a VM for it." Problem is, unless someone else is hosting your data center, you can't just call up and order more capacity without paying for more hardware.
Second-biggest with a consolidation like this is incomplete requirements. Lowest-bidder contractors are not going to do a good job of gathering every single requirement...even high-bidder contractors have problems with this. And the problem is that the more they miss, the worse the fallout. A certain large company I used to work for found this out the hard way moving their inhouse data center to one of the big IT services companies. I'm a systems guy, and had all my stuff well documented. Others were pissed off they were losing their jobs and intentionally withheld information...the contractors didn't follow up, and a lot of last minute scrambling had to be done to complete the migration.
Third problem for a government IT consolidation? Some huge services company like Accenture or IBM is going to win the bid and staff the project with dumbasses they pulled off the street in order to maximize profits. (Yes, this happened in my case in point #2 above...the sales staff presented the A Squad and swapped them out as soon as the contract was signed.) Not that government employees are rockstars, but they at least have a vested interest in keeping the data safe. IBM will probably win the contract too, given their involvement with government systems already. IBM has been so India-happy over the last ten years that I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the (non security critical) work ends up there.
Just like PMs treat VMs as magic hardware, CIOs treat outsourcers as magic black boxes that flawlessly run their IT operations. Unfortunately, the reality is not as sunny beneath the surface!
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Oh, there's plenty of consulting companies you can apply with. Google is your friend. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Google was one of the companies whose 'cloud platform' will be making money off the government, so you could try there first. ;-)
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This is no joke. I work at one of the biggest government data centers, and we consider Google to be alternately either our best friend or the people who will put us out of business. Google is our biggest domestic consumer -- I think they've already sucked down all the data we have here on site. I could easily see them positioning themselves to take over the ingesting and archiving responsibilities.
Google likely already has a copy of all the nonclassified data that the government is holding. The only peo
Re: (Score:2)
You sound like a perfect match, then! Seriously, it's all about moving crap around - that's how money/power/growth is made. In the business world, I've seen perfectly good 4 year old systems tossed because of "anticipated demands," "hardware obsolescence," and "lack of experienced staff."
Sometimes there are good, valid reasons. But usually it's someone out to make a name for themselves.