Defence discovers 3000 apps: Video
In an interview discussing various aspects of Defence IT, department chief information officer Greg Farr said he'd discovered almost 3000 more applications on his servers than he had previously been aware of.
Farr estimated that there were around 4000 applications running on Defence's 8000-plus servers, a threefold increase from his last count. Farr told ZDNet.com.au in an interview in 2008 that he'd uncovered 1300, although he'd expected more would surface.
"We've got a pretty good idea of our big applications — the ones that are used all the time, but there's an awful lot of small applications — some of them undoubtedly orphan — some of them very, very specialised and only used in a very small area of the organisation," Farr said.
"What we don't know is how many of those are still being used."
Farr also said that Defence was taking a look at all of its servers to check what applications were on them, who owned them, and what the owners were doing with them. He had previously said that having too many applications created serious problems when changing onto new systems, as suddenly half of them wouldn't work.
"The next stage will be a consolidation," he said. "The words I've been using to people both internally and externally [are] 'We need to consolidate, simplify and standardise'. And where we've got competing technologies we need to settle on one."
Farr also spoke on datacentre consolidation, saying his department was currently going through the process of a stock take of servers.