Agencies Will Shutter Nearly 400 Data Centers Before October

The government has shuttered 420 data centers since 2010, 38 of them in the past 10 weeks, according to updated figures the Office of Management and Budget released Friday.

Agencies plan to close 396 more centers by the end of September, according to a spreadsheet posted to the government open data platform Data.gov.

The government had closed 382 data centers as of the last update in November. The latest update included all data centers closed as of Jan. 25.

OMB plans to shut down about 40 percent of the government’s original stock of roughly 3,100 data centers by the end of 2015. The program is expected to save $5 billion, though those savings won’t all have accrued by the 2015 deadline, federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel has said.

The initiative is aimed at modernizing the government’s computer storage by shifting to more efficient consolidated data centers and to computer clouds. Because data centers can vary greatly in size and complexity, the raw number of closed data centers is not always a clear indication of the government’s overall progress toward those goals. 

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