Cutting Cost by Embracing the Software-Defined Information Technology!

The federal government agencies are facing an increasingly tight budget for both their current fiscal year and the foreseeable years to come. In the current political environment, it is paramount for the government agencies to find new innovative ways and means to accomplish the agencies’ missions with increasingly less funding and fewer resources.

Nowadays, we are confronted daily by new waves of technological innovations and digital revolution, such as M2M, Internet of Things (IoT), and Software-Defined Everything (SDX), one of which, the hot buzz of the day, Software-Defined Networking (SDN), will not only provide tremendous cost-savings in the short-run, but also enable the agencies to transform their existing network infrastructure and computing architectures to operate more efficiently and effectively in a long run. Here are the reasons why:

By definition, SDN will introduce a vendor-neutral and open platform for the enterprise network infrastructure and data centers alike, which, in turn, will be able to provide an equal playing field for all vendors, big or small, to have the opportunity to compete for the government IT infrastructure procurements and contracts, as long as they are in compliance with the new SDN standards such as the OpenFlow protocol for their networking products.

By introducing a competitive multi-vendor networking environment in the government agencies, the SDN will dramatically lower the cost as compared to the single vendor networking environment, which is very common nowadays in many federal government agencies. According to a most recent online survey of 300 federal network managers conducted in February 2014 by MeriTalk, the network infrastructure diversification by way of multi-vendors competition, which will ultimately lead to 50% additional savings for the agencies’ IT acquisitions, service, and maintenance costs.

Furthermore, by aggressively adopting the cost-saving technology initiatives, such as data center consolidation and virtualization, public and private cloud computing solutions, multi-vendor network infrastructure diversification, and software-defined Information Technology including the SDN, software-defined data center (SDDC), software-defined storage (SDS), etc., the federal government agencies will eventually be able to achieve major cost savings and operational efficiencies, while at the same time being able to carry out and fulfill their missions to serve the public in the current challenging political and fiscal environments.

Obviously, adopting those innovative technology initiatives are huge undertaking and change is always difficult, if not almost impossible, in many government agencies.  However, with the current budget constraints, the choices are limited for many federal agencies. The decision makers need to be able to enthusiastically embrace the SDX, including SDN, in order to remain relevant in the current Software-Defined Information Technology revolution.

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Disclaimer: The views presented are only personal opinions and they do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Government.