Seven steps to accelerate IT modernization and agile infrastructure.

The Pentagon didn’t close as many data centers as its chief information officer would have liked, he said Wednesday.

Secretary Eric Fanning has laid out an explicit plan for the Army to achieve its data center closure and consolidation goals by 2018 — an effort that has otherwise made little progress in the past two years.

The Defense Department’s data center closure team began its work on Monday, an official said Tuesday. Kicking off its work in Charleston, S.C., the team is armed with a template for gathering data on the performance of a cluster of defense data centers in the city, DOD Chief Information Officer Terry Halvorsen said Tuesday in a media roundtable with reporters.

The Defense Department is planning in the first quarter of fiscal year 2017 to launch a team to review some of the department’s worst performing data centers and recommend some for closure, officials said Thursday. Improving the department’s data center infrastructure is one of many goals explained in a recently-published document, which outlines a larger vision for the future of the DOD’s IT environment. DOD CIO Terry Halvorsen, and Randall Conway, deputy chief information officer for information enterprise, discussed the plan so far for the data center closure team Thursday with reporters at the Pentagon.

The White House finalized a policy Monday that forbids agencies from budgeting funds toward the creation or expansion of data centers, with few exceptions.