Federal Government Information Technology

Legacy IT makes federal agencies less secure, study says

Fedscoop: Federal agencies that shift money from maintaining outdated legacy IT systems to modernizing them can expect to see fewer cybersecurity incidents — as can the agencies that migrate legacy systems to the cloud or implement strict data governance policies, according to a new academic study.

On average, for each 1 percent of its spending that an agency shifts from maintaining legacy systems to buying new ones, it can expect a 5 percent reduction in the number of security incidents, found the authors of the study “Security Breaches in the U.S. Federal Government.” It was written by two academics from the Fox Business School at Temple University and the Red McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin and published last week by the Social Science Research Network.

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