Major data center provider CyrusOne has signed an alliance agreement with US government contractor CSRA, whose role is to modernize and streamline federal IT systems. 

Cyrus won 

CyrusOne’s data center in Sterling, Virginia
CyrusOne’s data center in Sterling, Virginia – CyrusOne

As part of the contract, CyrusOne will become the company’s “go-to” data center provider for US government agencies.

Fred Holloway, CyrusOne’s VP for federal business development said: “partnering with CSRA enables us to build upon our robust experience supporting the Federal System Integrator community. We are looking forward to collaborating with CSRA to help federal customers modernize their legacy infrastructure to help streamline and expedite internal processes.”

“We are pleased to join forces with CyrusOne and provide next-generation data center space and power for our government customers,” said Yogesh Khanna, CSRA’s CTO.

“This partnership allows CSRA to rely on CyrusOne’s talented experts to operate the physical data centers that support our customers and their mission. We look forward to bolstering this operation in the months ahead.”

Despite government data center consolidation targets laid out by the previous US administration, federal agencies prefer to run some workloads on physical servers rather than use the cloud, for the sake of security.

But with efficiency in mind, in 2015, the US government created the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), an assessment tool to verify which cloud providers could be deemed secure enough to hold government workloads, and has since given major cloud operators the all clear. Other CSRA partners include AWS, Microsoft Azure, Cisco, Oracle and SAP.