#DellWorld: Former US CIO reveals government IT spending quirks

AUSTIN: Vivek Kundra, former CIO of the US government, took to the stage at Dell World 2011 and gave a candid account of the problems facing the US as it tries to reduce IT spending and make infrastructure more efficient.

The US government spends $80bn a year on IT and has more than 12,000 major systems across the globe, which help to maintain systems including Medicare and Social Security, he said.

Kundra explained that inefficiency was rife in government departments when he joined in 2009, despite the US spending $600bn in the last decade to try and modernise infrastructure and systems.

"The Department of Defence spent 10 years and $850m on an ERP system that just didn't work," he told delegates.

"Infrastructure had grown from 432 data centres to more than 2,000 datacentres in 10 years. The average utilisation in CPU cycles was under 27 per cent and average storage utilisation under 40 per cent."

Kundra helped to bring in a zero growth policy regarding datacentres, and the government has set a target of closing 800 of them by 2015.

In a rather bizarre policy, Kundra also noted that mobile devices were assigned to workers based on the square footage of size of an office and the number of years they had been in government.

Looking to the future, Kundra emphasised that security is no longer about protecting information from teenage hackers, but from other nations.

"Nations are building offensive cyber capabilities and organised cyber crime [is increasing]. The US has adversaries that want to come after our command and control infrastructure," he said.

"The Obama administration put in place a four-star general who's focused on cyber command so the US can have offensive cyber capabilities and so we can defend our infrastructure."

Kundra explained that teams are deployed to attack the US infrastructure so gaps in security can be found and plugged.

"The next generation of warfare is in the cyber plain. This is like an arms race so there isn't a point where you're just done with security."