GCN Magazine: 5 ways to subvert the risk of legacy IT

In today’s always-on, always-connected age, government agencies face increasing pressure to make immediate and significant progress on digital initiatives, while minimizing the costly risk of downtime. Legacy systems, however, often hamper digital transformation and stand in the way of a full view of operational performance. These proprietary and decentralized systems don’t communicate with each other, making them a challenge to monitor in a comprehensive and efficient way.

In fact, according to the Washington Post, many of the IRS' 60 legacy IT systems have not received updates in decades, raising the risk of crippling downtime, as the agency learned in the 2018 Tax Day outage.  In its review of the system crash, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration cited inferior processes to monitor, report and respond to a system failure when it occurs; lack of oversight and accountability in contractors who failed to meet service-level standards for monitoring and incident management; and lack of redundancy or automatic failover, leading to a single point of failure. 

Read full article in GCN Magazine