Federal Agencies Gain More Time and Money to Comply with the DCOI

On November 21, 2017, the President signed into law the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) Enhancement Act of 2017.  Among other, current changes, this piece of legislation extends the Federal Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) through 2020.  However, without a modification or replacement to M-16-19, agencies are still currently required to adhere to the current guidance to achieve the target goals of the DCOI by September 30, 2018.

On December 12, 2017, the Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act was signed by the President into law. This act establishes a working capital fund which federal agencies can use to update their outdated IT infrastructure, and boost their IT efficiency and security.

So what does this mean to the federal agencies who are obligated to comply with the mandates of the Federal DCOI?

It means that agencies will likely have more time (if and when there is a modification or replacement to M-16-19), and more money available to help them achieve their goals.

And who doesn’t like more time and more money?

Since many federal agencies have been struggling to meet the DCOI mandates, the extended deadline comes as a blessing. Now is certainly the time to address these issues – and we agree it’s no easy task.

As the first DCIM solution provider to offer a comprehensive product for meeting all the requirements of the U.S. Federal DCOI, Nlyte’s DCIM solution has helped over 30 federal agencies with compliance mandates.  Additionally, Nlyte is now offering DCOI On-Demand, to expedite the deployment of DCIM for Federal agencies and help them not only monitor and report on their DCOI metrics, but achieve their IT modernization goals.  Nlyte DCOI On-Demand deploys the best-in-class Nlyte DCIM platform in a FedRAMP certified cloud infrastructure environment to strengthen the security posture of the agency while adhering to their cloud-first application deployment initiatives.

Here’s how your federal agency data center can implement Nlyte’s DCOI solution to meet and exceed the mandates:

Asset Management

The reason the DCOI mandates were established in the first place was to address the antiquated government infrastructure. Instead of spending enormous amounts of funds every year to maintain legacy systems, this spending should be used to update to more modern infrastructure. Nlyte’s Asset Management capability provides a data center manager with all the information needed to track assets throughout their lifecycle, and know when retirement of the assets might be more efficient than continued maintenance.  The new Nlyte Asset Explorer module automatically collects and presents detailed information about all devices connected to your organization’s network.  Further the comprehensive analytics provide the rich set of data to support your MGT justification submittal.

Capacity Planning

Nlyte’s System Utilization Monitoring can help address the legislation’s mandate to utilize data center capacity to its fullest. Nlyte’s DCOI solution can be instrumental by helping evaluate historical and present consumption patterns to gain the information needed to rearrange data center capacity for greater efficiency, and plan for future needs. Safe consolidation of assets can help reduce total floor area, rack count, defer expansion, and even close facilities no longer needed.

DCOI legislation also addresses energy conservation. Nlyte Energy Optimizer provides real-time energy usage figures and pinpoints areas where power is being used to help achieve consolidation and efficiency.

Report on savings

The DCOI also stipulates that federal agencies must be able to identify and report on their energy savings.  Facility managers can use Nlyte’s DCOI Analytics module to securely share key DCOI metrics with overseeing agencies without exposing the operations to outside organizations.

Nlyte’s DCOI Executive Dashboards track DCOI mandates versus actual performance to indicate when the mandates will be achieved.  This simplifies mandated reporting to the GAO by automating and consolidating data from all reporting divisions.

We know our way around a federal agency data center.  The Nlyte federal team works with 30 government agencies, like NASA JPL, DOE, and others to boost their DCOI scores and prepare their MGT submittals.

The Nlyte team is ready and available to answer any questions you may have regarding jumpstarting your data center to meet the DCOI mandates.  We’re just a phone call or an email away – just because the EO has been extended to 2020, there’s no time like now to establish a defined DCOI plan to make that grade in time and on budget.