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Member, Beacon International Group, Ltd.
ORLANDO, Fla.—The insurance industry and the government face similar challenges resulting from outdated technology infrastructures, said Vivek Kundra, former chief information officer of the United States, on Wednesday at the ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum.
Delivering the keynote address in Orlando, Fla., Mr. Kundra recounted his two-year term as the federal government's first CIO. Upon assuming the position in 2009, Mr. Kundra said he found that the federal government ran more than 2,000 data centers, up from 432 in 1998.
The rapid increase resulted in inefficiency, he said.
“When we took over, the average (central processing unit) utilization was under 27%, and storage utilization was under 40%,” he said.
To remedy this, Mr. Kundra said he instituted a “cloud-first” policy and announced his intention to close 40% of existing federal data centers, with the goal being to treat information technology as a commodity in as many areas of government where practical.
“We wanted to move the federal government away from a culture of asset ownership to one of service provisioning,” Mr. Kundra said, noting that in the first year he shut down 137 data centers.
“It’s easy to procure and build data centers or buy a new system, because it’s linear thinking. It’s more difficult to think about what the customer really wants,” he said.
Mr. Kundra warned that private industry must similarly guard against “a culture that values process over outcomes” and said such thinking was especially dangerous when it comes to cyber security.
The “citadel” model of keeping enterprise data safe behind firewalls is insufficient given the evolving nature of threats, he said. “You have to start to think about security at a data-element level,” he said.
Nonetheless, he expressed optimism for the ability of technology to alter the business world for the better, citing cloud computing, mobility and, above all, social media technologies as examples.