The US Department of the Interior (DOI) was recently seeking recommendations for enterprise hosting strategies.

The DOI oversees the management and conservation of federal lands, natural resources, and administers certain relations with American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and affiliated Island Communities.

On June 25, the Department posted a Request for Information (RFI) on sam.gov, seeking “information and recommendations on the best path forward for ensuring a solid infrastructure for its information technology needs.”

This will form part of “the acquisition planning and market research phase for acquisition related to large enterprise hosting solutions.”

Responses could consider items such as “fast-tracking the consolidation and/or closure of data centers, accelerating the adoption of new technologies for legacy applications and systems, and offering strategies/methods to prevent further cloud sprawl of DOI’s cloud hosting environment.”

This refers to the patchwork state of the DOI’s digital infrastructure.

The DOI currently uses 250 significant IT systems in tandem with small applications that range from the modern to those at “risk of technological obsolescence.” Major cloud service providers, including AWS, Microsoft, and Google, also provide the department single enterprise environments.

Moreover, the DOI operates 871 data centers in 46 locations across the US and American Samoa, totaling 47,592 sq ft (4,421 sqm) of gross floor area.

835 of these data centers are non-tiered as defined by Uptime Institute because of requirements including “convenience, insufficient network connectivity capacity that requires onsite data storage and system processing, and other specialized circumstances requiring network isolation.”

Written responses were due on July 16.

The US government has long attempted to consolidate and streamline its digital infrastructure.

The Federal Data Center Optimization Initiative came to an end in Fiscal Year 2022 after closing more than 6,000 data centers over 12 years, and the subsequent Federal Data Center Enhancement Act of 2022 was implemented through Memorandum M-25-03 by the Biden administration in January 2025.

In July 2025, a report from the Government Accountability Office found that the US government still had not modernized seven of the 11 most critical federal legacy systems. The remaining legacy systems are between 23 and 59 years old, and some of the hardware in the IT systems is more than two decades old. Among the departments identified in that report was the Department of the Interior.