What Are The Priorities?

Post is spearheading a comprehensive plan announced in March 2010 to modernize and consolidate the outdated and often incompatible data infrastructure at more than 40 city agencies. The goal: To lower the New York City's cost of operations by up to $100 million over five years, reduce energy consumption and emissions, strengthen security, and improve overall IT service quality for agencies.  Citywide data center consolidation is one of the primary facets of this initiative.

DoITT is in the process of a top-to-bottom agency review and implementation of the Citywide IT Infrastructure Services program (CITIServ). New York City's legacy IT infrastructure is highly-fragmented, with more than 60 unique data centers serving 83 different entities, according to Post. Many of these are located in prime commercial real estate space. The vast majority of these facilities, and the technologies within them, are obsolete, and having dozens of entities employ the varied capital and skill sets necessary to maintain individual data centers is an inefficient use of resources.

Even worse, notes Post, these are not optimized for business continuity and disaster recovery. "We're not talking about forklifting servers from one location to another," she says, "but rather rationalizing how New York City approaches its IT infrastructure."