Federal CIO: Government isn't fully utilizing its servers

As government agencies in the United States invest billions in new data centers and servers, federal CIO Vivek Kundra blasted them for not taking advantage of preexisting resources:

One of the most troubling aspects about the data centers is that in a lot of these cases, we’re finding that server utilization is actually around seven percent.

That’s right. Some government entities are only using about 7% of their server capacity, but are still spending large sums of money to upgrade their infrastructure. Kundra also cited other examples of government waste. For instance, the TSA wanted to spend $600,000 to set up a blog before being stopped by the CIO. Such a site could have been created for free using open source platforms like WordPress.

Kundra hopes a switch to cloud computing will reduce waste. Last year, the General Services Administration saved some $1.7 million by using cloud computing.