The State of Ohio Computer Center is rapidly becoming home to a significant portion of the computing power formerly housed by individual agencies and schools. Collocated on the grounds of Ohio State University and the responsibility of the Department of Administrative Services Office of Properties and Facilities, the centralized facility is expected to save individual organizations, both schools and local governments, significant money in IT related expenses.
The most recent addition to the SOCC is the IT services used by the most heavily populated county in Ohio, Cuyahoga County, which expects to save over a million dollars a year by consolidating their facilities with the state organization. Their decision comes on the heels of OSU actually collocating the university data center with the state facility.
Since its implementation in 2013, as a basic part of the state's plan to move to cloud services, more than 5,000 server instances have been consolidated into the SOCC, showing how well accepted the consolidation plan has been by both state and local agencies. Long term plans will continue to ave more money which means that tax dollars can be better spent on programs that don't simply duplicate efforts. Hopefully, the Federal government's consolidation programs will be as effective.