Do you overvalue your data centers? 76% of surveyed government employees say their agency does

Almost three quarters of government information technology (IT) professionals and decision-makers say their agency holds onto their data centers for too long, and overvalues those data centers, according to MeriTalk’s recently published report and infographic “Infrastructure Psychology: Overvaluing Outdated Data Centers.”

In June, 215 public sector survey respondents at Amazon Web Services (AWS) annual AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, DC 2019 shared their feedback on why the public sector is behind industry in migrating to the cloud and the public sector’s perceived barriers to migration.

When asked why their agency hadn’t migrated to the cloud, 51% of respondents cited, “It’s too expensive.” Related to costs of migration, what costs were most considered? 68% of respondents cited infrastructure costs, 59% cited the time (work hours) needed to migrate, and 54% cited the labor costs. Read more about the total cost of ownership of the cloud in the AWS whitepaper, “Maximizing Value with AWS.”

Is the public sector truly behind industry when it comes to cloud migration?

According to survey results, only 32% of government IT professionals have formally assessed the value of their data center in the last year, compared to almost half of private industry.

The good news?

93% of respondents said they are actively taking steps toward data center modernization. And 44% said they closed at least one data center.

The survey and the resulting study was underwritten by AWS, Alfresco, Hitachi Vantara Federal, and ThunderCat Technology.

Check out the full report, “Infrastructure Psychology: Overvaluing Outdated Data Centers.”