By Alban de Bergevin, Manager, Mission Critical and Cloud, Microsoft Federal
There is a devastating affliction sweeping across the country – it’s called data overload. Executives from both industry and government are being targeted, but they are finding they can’t hide from “big data”. Complex enterprises like federal agencies are struggling to store, search, analyze and understand the exploding amounts of information they manage in order to make more informed decisions. A study released last year by Kelton Research confirmed this, revealing that 56 percent of C-level executives from industry and government feel overwhelmed by the amount of data their organization manages.
To help federal executives combat data overload, Microsoft and HP have created a series of data appliances designed to optimize productivity and improve decision-making. The goal was to quickly and efficiently deliver application services like business intelligence (BI), data warehousing, online transaction processing and messaging. These are services that have traditionally taken months to roll out, that are now available to organizations in weeks or even days. Appliances save time and money because they eliminate the need to buy hardware and software. Organizations no longer have to spend time planning their architectures and deploying their software – they can focus that time on meeting business or mission goals.
So what does this mean for federal agencies? In addition to using BI tools for insights into how to serve citizens more effectively, or messaging tools for better collaboration, federal CIOs now have a quick path to creating their own private cloud. The HP Database Consolidation Appliance is capable of consolidating hundreds of databases into a single, virtual environment, and agencies can migrate data and applications at their own pace. Leveraging the power of virtualization, agencies can manage data more efficiently in support of Vivek Kundra’s goal of eliminating 800 federal data centers by the year 2015. By bringing previously disparate databases and servers together within a virtual environment, we can consolidate the total number of data centers required to serve the federal government.
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