Government agencies see cyber threats as major barrier to tech improvements

Dive Brief:

Federal government leaders are prioritizing cybersecurity improvements as they sketch out their technology-modernization agendas for the year, consulting firm EY said in a survey released this week.
Roughly half of survey respondents (56%) said cybersecurity was one of their top modernization priorities, with roughly a third saying that growing cybersecurity threats “are a barrier for their agencies to achieve their modernization goals,” the survey found.
EY also presented data on government leaders’ impressions of their agencies’ current security postures and their hopes for AI.

Dive Insight:

One of the most striking findings in the EY report is that government leaders believe their agencies are generally doing well on cybersecurity and IT modernization, despite a steady stream of breaches over the years.

“Eighty-five percent of federal [decision makers] give their agencies ‘A (excellent)’ or ‘B (good)’ grades for performance in cybersecurity and resilience enhancements,” EY said.

That finding indicates that government leaders “feel set up for future success,” the company added, even as problems like outdated legacy systems persist.

Indeed, only one-fifth of respondents said they had completed a transformation of their technology platforms to modern, secure infrastructure. Roughly half of respondents instead said they were either in the planning stage or the middle of the transformation.

Forty-four percent of government leaders say their agencies are in the middle of “efficiency initiatives to enhance cybersecurity infrastructure” this year, according to the report.

In addition to cybersecurity threats, government leaders described regulations and limited vendor options as barriers to modernization. Thirty percent and 27% of respondents, respectively, cited those factors.

Government leaders overwhelmingly want to make sure their organizations have the right processes in place to manage new technologies before they implement them, with 96% of respondents endorsing this step. Interestingly, compared with improving cybersecurity defenses, protecting critical infrastructure and supply chains received significantly less interest, with only 36% and 35% of respondents, respectively, citing those priorities.

The share of federal leaders who prioritize replacing legacy technology (54%) closely mirrored the share of respondents who cited cybersecurity improvements as a top priority (56%), illustrating how the two issues often go hand in hand.

Government agencies, like private companies, are eager to find efficiencies through increased AI use, and 55% of federal leaders called improving cybersecurity “one of the biggest benefits of their agencies using AI.”

But AI adoption remains limited, EY found, with half of all AI projects at surveyed agencies remaining in the pilot or planning phases. “Many agencies have yet to identify specific use cases for the technology,” the report added. One of the biggest challenges agencies face in adopting AI is the difficulty of integrating it into legacy IT systems.