Study: Virtualization offers big savings to federal agencies

A new report from public-private partnership MeriTalk says that while federal agencies are making progress on some crucial IT programs, they aren’t leveraging the full advantage of initiatives in areas including virtualization, cloud computing, remote access, consolidation and infrastructure diversification.
MeriTalk focuses on improving the outcomes of government IT, and the study was underwritten by networking company Brocade. The report is based on an online survey of 300 federal network managers in February of this year, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 5.62%.
The survey showed that network managers believe they could save 24% of their IT budgets — more than double what they currently save — if they were taking full advantage of the five areas covered in the study. That would mean about $19.7 billion in annual savings.
While those managers said that the network is the most vital piece of IT infrastructure for enabling cost-savings and efficiences, two-thirds said that their networks are “ill equipped to meet their mission needs, let alone support new technology initiatives,” according to MeriTalk. Most participants said that network issues disrupt their work at least bimonthly due to downtime, poor connections or service disruptions. They also indicated that they would need to increase their network capacity by about 26% to support the five infrastructure initiatives and realize the potential savings over the long term.
Seventy percent of respondents said that their remote access initiatives were partially or fully deployed. Consolidation was one area where most saw significant savings that could yet be achieved: 62% reported that they were in the consolidation process, but agencies said they were only capturing about 40% of the potential savings in that area.
Only 14% of the participants said that they had completed virtualization initiatives, and felt they were missing out on up to $2.7 billion in possible savings. Cloud computing had even more potential for growth, with only 9% of survey respondents categorizing the initiative as fully deployed.
The full report can be downloaded here.