Some federal agencies including the US Postal Service and the International Development Finance Corporation now use it preconfigured, plug-and-play technologies to speed up deployment and meet their operational requirements, FedTech Magazine reported Thursday.
Jonathan Alboumfederal chief technology officer at Service Todaysaid the use of plug-and-play systems not only reflects the shift to a service- or cloud-based mindset but also accelerates digital transformation efforts at agencies, which he said need to create their own infrastructure and handle all relevant hardware and software in the past.
“As the federal government has become more focused on data center consolidation concepts, some of the smaller IT operations have been subsumed into larger business operations at the department level or a government-wide service provider,” said Alboum. “The focus has shifted toward, ‘What solutions can I use?'”
Plug-and-play systems can also enable agencies to centralize operations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for example, has implemented NVIDIA’s Bright Cluster Manager computing platform to manage the core and satellite locations of a clustered environment through a single interface.
“Simplicity is a driver for a lot of what we do,” Alboum said.
“The search for less complexity and for not spending more time engineering something is very attractive,” he added.