The state of federal technology: ‘A crisis bigger than Y2K’

Federal Chief Information Officer Tony Scott said he believes one of the biggest challenges agencies are facing today is around legacy IT systems.

Scott said the use of decades old systems impacts cybersecurity, mission effectiveness and the ability to be more mobile.

“We are facing a crisis that is bigger than Y2K. It’s just there is no Dec. 31, 1999. Much of the government today runs on very old, outdated technology. The people that understand it, who built it and are running it are leaving every day. We are not building capacity with those skill sets,” Scott said Nov. 16 at the President’s Management Advisory Board meeting in Washington. “And just to do a lift and shift with those old architectures is the wrong answer. Moving to a more shared infrastructure, shared capability is probably a better model, one that is cloud based. But it will take some significant transformation and significant re-architecting of what we have.”

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