Federal CIO: Obsolete tech ‘not going to get better if we wait’

Federal Chief Information Officer Tony Scott is pleading for industry and government officials to support a $3.1 billion modernization plan for the government’s out-of-date technology systems.  

“This is not one of those situations where it’s going to get better if we wait. It’s not a partisan issue. This is the single biggest opportunity I know of to do something different in this space,” Scott told a crowd at the Brocade Federal Forum in Washington.

{mosads}Much of the government runs on technology that predates modern cybersecurity, and is so old that the skills needed to program and upkeep the equipment is largely untaught in schools. 

Around 80 percent of the IT budget is spent maintaining legacy systems, a problem the House Oversight Committee called a “ticking time bomb” in a recent hearing on the subject. 

Though it is immediately cheaper to pay for the upkeep of old technology, the costs add up over time. The Navy, for example, pays $9 million a year to Microsoft to continue releasing updates for Windows XP systems.

Legacy technology can also be a security risk. At the time of the Office of Personnel Management breach, which exposed a huge trove of government data, the files were not encrypted because the systems were too old to handle it.

The Obama administration has proposed $3.1 billion to update the systems. Scott has been a vocal proponent.

“If you’re riding a dead horse, it’s best to dismount,” he told a House panel during its hearing. “I think it’s time to dismount from past practices and modernize.”