Respond to the questions below in a 4 pages Word document.
DTGOV is a public company that was created in the early 1980s by the Ministry of Social Security. The decentralization of the ministrys IT operations to a public company under private law gave DTGOV an autonomous management structure with significant flexibility to govern and evolve its IT enterprise.
At the time of its creation, DTGOV had approximately 1,000 employees, operational branches in 60 localities nation-wide, and operated two mainframe-based data centers. Over time, DTGOV has expanded to more than 3,000 employees and branch offices in more than 300 localities, with three data centers running both mainframe and low-level platform environments. Its main services are related to processing social security benefits across the country.
DTGOV has enlarged its customer portfolio in the last two decades. It now serves other public-sector organizations and provides basic IT infrastructure and services, such as server hosting and server colocation. Some of its customers have also outsourced the operation, maintenance, and development of applications to DTGOV.
DTGOV has sizable customer contracts that encompass various IT resources and services. However, these contracts, services, and associated service levels are not standardizednegotiated service provisioning conditions are typically customized for each customer individually. DTGOVs operations are resultantly becoming increasingly complex and difficult to manage, which has led to inefficiencies and inflated costs.
The DTGOV board realized, some time ago, that the overall company structure could be improved by standardizing its services portfolio, which implies the reengineering of both IT operational and management models. This process has started with the standardization of the hardware platform through the creation of a clearly defined
technological lifecycle, a consolidated procurement policy, and the establishment of new acquisition practices.
Technical Infrastructure and Environment
DTGOV operates three data centers: one is exclusively dedicated to low-level platform servers while the other two have both mainframe and low-level platforms. The mainframe systems are reserved for the Ministry of Social Security and therefore not available for outsourcing.
The data center infrastructure occupies approximately 20,000 square feet of computer room space and hosts more than 100,000 servers with different hardware configurations. The total storage capacity is approximately 10,000 terabytes. DTGOVs network has redundant high-speed data links connecting the data centers in a full mesh topology. Their Internet connectivity is considered to be provider-independent since their network interconnects all of the major national telecom carriers.
Server consolidation and virtualization projects have been in place for five years, considerably decreasing the diversity of hardware platforms. As a result, systematic tracking of the investments and operational costs related to the hardware platform has revealed significant improvement. However, there is still remarkable diversity in their software platforms and configurations due to customer service customization requirements.
Business Goals and New Strategy
A chief strategic objective of the standardization of DTGOVs service portfolio is to achieve increased levels of cost effectiveness and operational optimization. An internal executive-level commission was established to define the directions, goals, and strategic roadmap for this initiative. The commission has identified cloud computing as a guidance option and an opportunity for further diversification and improvement of services and customer portfolios.
The roadmap addresses the following key points: