New York City: The IT Infrastructure That Never Sleeps

New York City opened its new data center in downtown Brooklyn on Feb. 28, 2011. The 18,000-square-foot facility will enable the City to centralize the technology infrastructure of 40 agencies by the end of 2014. The consolidation will save the city roughly $100 million in that time frame, according to the city’s Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications (DoITT), which operates as the city’s IT utility.

To date, the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment’ IT operations, the Department of Sanitation’s IT Service Desk, and the Department of Education’s “HR Connect” application have been moved into the centralized environment. These systems alone support 140,000 users, and their consolidation will achieve a recurring annual savings of approximately $200,000, according to DoITT.  In addition, ongoing consolidation work at the Department of Finance and the Department of Citywide Administrative Services will realize several million dollars in incremental gains due to certain targeted migrations and investment deferrals, the City says.

In the next 12 months, 19 agencies will have their technology infrastructure centralized into the new data center.

The consolidation effort, known as the Citywide IT Infrastructure Services Program (CITIServ), aims to reduce New York City’s IT infrastructure footprint. Other goals include:

• Creating a unified set of shared IT services to New York City entities
• Reducing energy consumption
• Strengthening IT security
• Improving overall service quality for New York City agencies

“By reducing the IT work done by individual City agencies, we’ll enable them to concentrate more of their resources on what they really do best: teaching students, protecting our neighborhoods, cleaning our streets, preventing and putting out fires, and doing all the other things that improve our quality of life,” says New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in a prepared statement.