JEDI will ease DOD’s FITARA woes, but when?

The latest FITARA scorecard released by the House Oversight Committee criticizes the Department of Defense yet again. 

Of the eight categories covered in the report, DOD’s letter grade was an “F” in five of them.  Citing data reported to Congress and multiple GAO reports, the Committee took DOD to task for failing to break up IT projects into manageable chunks, identify duplicative IT spending, optimize software licensing agreements, and move away from costly legacy IT investments.

DOD’s FITARA scorecard

In a response to the committee, DOD CIO Dana Deasy noted the challenge of addressing the complicated thicket of IT spending in an agency as large as DOD.  He was able to foreshadow progress in one particular area, however – data center consolidation.

The Data Center Consolidation Initiative (DCOI) was created in 2014 as a way of trimming down the out-of-control costs of data centers throughout the Federal government.  Since the program’s creation, DOD has closed 834 data centers, with an additional 1,112 closures planned for the current fiscal year.

This massive shift in resources begs the question – how will DOD meet its computing needs as all of these data centers are eliminated?  Enter the JEDI program, which is designed to move a significant amount of computing power away from both data centers and private clouds and into a COTS cloud offering.  The financial advantages of this approach are clear – JEDI will finally allow DOD to pay for compute based on what it actually uses instead of its perceived capacity requirements.


An avatar of the author

BlueCat provides core services and solutions that help our customers and their teams deliver change-ready networks. With BlueCat, organizations can build reliable, secure, and agile mission-critical networks that can support transformation initiatives such as cloud adoption and automation. BlueCat’s growing portfolio includes services and solutions for automated and unified DDI management, network security, multicloud management, and network observability and health.

Related content

Banner announcing BlueCat's acquisition of LiveAction, displaying both logos and the phrase "We're about to get bigger."

BlueCat acquires LiveAction to drive network modernization and optimization

BlueCat’s acquisition of LiveAction will allow customers to expand their view beyond DNS and dive deeper into the health of their network.

Read more

Simplify NIS2 compliance with DNS management

Learn whether the EU’s NIS2 requirements apply to your organization and about how DNS management and BlueCat can boost your path to compliance.

Read more

Detect anomalies and CVE risks with Infrastructure Assurance 8.4 

The Infrastructure Assurance 8.4 release features an anomaly detection engine for outliers and a CVE analysis engine to uncover device vulnerabilities.

Read more

Get fast, resilient, and flexible DDI management with Integrity 9.6

With Integrity 9.6, network admins can get support for new DNS record types, architect and configure multi-primary DNS, and automate IP assignments.

Read more

BlueCat has acquired LiveAction

It’s official! BlueCat has acquired LiveAction’s network observability and intelligence platform, which helps large enterprises optimize the performance, resiliency, and security of their networks.