| | November 20178CIOReviewIn My OpinionBy Edward Rodden, CIO, SugarCreekRevamping the Federal IT Ecosystem Ninety Two Billion dollars, annually. A number, if expressing revenues, would represent a very large tech company.This is the annual budget for the Federal Government IT department, or somewhere in that vicinity depending on the source. Some forecasts call for it to reach One Hundred and Forty Billion by the mid 2020's. Wow.Now consider the fact that the Fed has been utilizing technology for a very long time; every physical iteration of compute and storage, the full evolution of operating systems and database structures, as well as the many programming languages and code sets that have and may continue to exist. Reportedly, much of this historical perspective remains in actual use today within the Fed.Edward RoddenImagine the complexity of environments and systems across this infrastructure. At an Enterprise level, we may occasionally deal with adding new physical locations, new systems, and absorbing acquisitions. By comparison, however, what we deal with in the Enterprise space is pretty simple.The impacts of this complexity are enormous. Start with people, always the most important (and difficult) part of any entity.It is hard enough to find competent, caring people with the right skill sets in current infrastructure and coding. Finding people with the knowledge to manage and maintain older environments and languages is extremely difficult as there is no incentive for people to learn these skill sets.As those that possess the skills retire or leave the workforce, this will become more and more difficult with those remaining probably not deeply conversant and trained only to the minimum knowledge to keep things functioning.From a physical standpoint, how do you maintain older equipment that is no longer being marketed? Where does one even find the 8" floppies that are reported to be in use still within the Fed?In reality, however, this is probably the least of concerns.The cost implications are very high. Staffing for a multitude of languages and infrastructure, and likely paying high dollars for those that still know how to repair and or maintain older physical environments has to be prohibitive.With all of the disparate entities involved, cost savings based on volume purchases and or maintenance are out of reach and lost.Security is an issue. From my perspective if you are more than two to three years behind the industry's current state of infrastructure you are at high risk. I can't begin to contemplate how one secures environments that are five to ten years (or more) old other than not allowing connections to the outside world and rigidly enforcing physical access constraints (not sure how this is supposed to read).There is no point in the question of "How did we get to this state?" No one could have anticipated the rapid rate of change
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