Feds Shuttering Data Centers for the 'Cloud'

The federal government is shuttering 137 data centers this year in as part of a long-term plan to move to "the cloud."

The government plans to close 800 of its more than 2,000 data centers by 2015, The Washington Post reported, moving the work to a web-based system.

Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra reports that 39 data centers have already been closed, with one-third of then belonging to NASA.

“We’re cracking down on duplicative, underutilized assets across the federal government,” he said according to the Post.

One of the centers closing is the 15,000-square-foot Department of Health and Human Services Center in Maryland, which generates about $1.2 million in annual electricity costs.

Kundra’s strategy promotes use of 'the cloud,' or Web-based, computing.

The Office of Management and Budget is pushing a “cloud-first” policy as a means of reducing costs. The General Services Administration and the Agriculture Department are planning to move their e-mail programs to the cloud and 15 federal agencies have identified 950,000 e-mail boxes that could also move to the cloud, the Post reported.