The federal government plans to shut down 40 percent (800) of its data centers over the next four years. The shuttering of facilities is expected to free up billions of dollars a year and acres of real estate.

Vivek Kundra, the outgoing federal CIO, told a panel of White House technology and science advisors that the way government does IT is very inefficient, DatacenterDynamics reports. Kundra said government should take advantage of standardization for commodity IT, noting:

From a commodity IT perspective, absolutely. My view is we should only have three major data centers across the entire US government.

The federal government plans to shut down 40 percent (800) of its data centers over the next four years. The shuttering of facilities is expected to free up billions of dollars a year and acres of real estate. Of course, it will also result in thousands of lost jobs as well.

The plan to consolidate data centers will also be a catalyst in the government shifting toward cloud computing. According to Kundra, moving to the cloud could result in billions in savings