If you could improve your agency’s bottom line and reduce your IT infrastructure costs, all without sacrificing mission-critical capabilities, where would you start?

Ideally, you’d like to know where you’re getting the best performance from your IT investment, along with knowledge about over-use and under-use so you’d know where to make cuts, and whether you might be able to consolidate some operations to save money.

That’s the key benefit of network monitoring, and it’s also important information to know from a compliance standpoint. The current regulatory landscape – as well as continuing budget belt-tightening across government – demands more efficient use of federal IT networks. For example, The Federal Information Security Management Act and OMB Circular A–130 mandate information technology planning reviews to evaluate the efficiency of agency information resources. The Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI) requires agencies to reduce the overall energy and real estate footprint of their data centers to manage costs, increase security, and improve efficiency.

This scrutiny is understandable. By some estimates, operating a single network server may cost anywhere between $10,000-$30,000 per year. Multiply that by hundreds upon hundreds of servers per agency, and it’s clear that optimizing the performance of your IT infrastructure – as well as the performance of applications on the network – can have an almost immediate budget benefit for your agency.

When considering network or data center consolidation, one possible alternative is the cloud, which is, after all, very similar to a virtual wide area network. The current 25-point federal IT reform plan from OMB calls for greater use of shared services and cloud-centric computing in general. It’s true that consolidating data centers by virtualizing servers, storage and desktops connected with broadband access can provide tremendous cost savings in IT infrastructure maintenance and support.

Moving to the cloud, however, also can put an added strain on your wide area network, with some very real network performance degradation issues. Network monitoring can help optimize your network and understand where you can consolidate your data centers or move some of your infrastructure to the cloud. That in turn makes for better budget efficiency and improved network performance.

One company I’m particularly familiar with is Riverbed Technology, which works with both civilian and military government agencies to help get the most from existing network infrastructure investments, and to reduce unnecessary network sprawl.

Consider the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA). Three years ago, DCMA had 18 data centers, with over 600 servers across the network in several hundred locations internationally, and a number of mission-critical applications served across the network. By virtualizing some parts of the network, and consolidating and optimizing its IT network infrastructure, DCMA has gone from 18 data centers to two today, and from 600 servers to 200.

There are three general benefits of network performance monitoring technology to improve the performance of your IT network, beyond the simple but significant issue of cost savings:

• Understanding your network usage: By establishing a profile for your network assets, you get a clear idea of how much strain is being put on your servers. With that insight, you can make better decisions on how to use those servers for mission-critical applications.
• Consolidating your network infrastructure: Do you want to establish a private or hybrid cloud for your operations? Can you eliminate expensive IT infrastructure you don’t really use? Network performance monitoring lets you get a clear picture of your IT environment and focus on gathering this information in real-time without human intervention. That way, you’ll know just how to virtualize certain network operations without degrading network performance.
• Getting the best use from network IT investments: Even if you’re not tech-savvy, you know that the less bandwidth you use, the more you have left for other applications – often with a smaller IT footprint overall. Make sure your network isn’t duplicating data unnecessarily. Minimizing data replication is important for improved disaster recovery and continuity of operations.

Network performance monitoring for servers and applications is being used throughout the intelligence community to consolidate IT networks and improve efficiency. Other organizations taking this innovative approach to their IT investments include the Veterans Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and most of the Department of Homeland Security – particularly Customs and Border Protection, which operates one of the largest optimized and accelerated networks.

For many of these agencies, network performance monitoring and optimization technologies enable organizations to maintain their current bandwidth levels, while making 65 to 95 percent of that existing bandwidth available for new applications.

The future is far from certain, with one exception – budgets aren’t likely to go up. As you continue to comply with federal initiatives to reduce and manage your agency’s IT infrastructure, keep in mind that it’s not just about the cloud – it’s about how to get the best possible return on investment from all your assets, today, tomorrow and well into the future.

Steve Charles is co-founder and Executive Vice President of immixGroup, Inc., which helps technology companies do business with the government. He is also a member of Breaking Gov’s Editorial Advisory Council.