Paul Christman has been in the computer business long enough to know what it takes to achieve a massive data migration in the federal government, He saw it with the Year 2000.
“Y2K was one of those moments in time that forced the accurate, complete inventory of IT, because of this tremendous fear that Y2K was going to bring down civilization as we knew it,” he said. The fear at the time, largely unrealized, was that computers would interpret the year 2000 as 1900 due to two-digit date fields in older programs.
The federal government isn’t facing a once-in-a-millennium crisis in its IT today, said Christman, Dell Software’s vice president of public sector, Government does, however, have a problem in corralling the massive project of updating its server infrastructure, he said.
“Other events like end-of-life for servers of desktop operating systems are not as momentous as Y2K, but it does force the idea of inventory and asset management to the fore.”
This week, an inspector general’s report noted that the IRS had 3,000 servers running on Windows 2003 software, which Microsoft stopped supporting in July 2015. The agency is paying the software company a premium fee to continue servicing the servers while it catalogs and updates them, but old systems could eventually present security problems for agencies collecting masses of personal information.
Christman said the IRS isn’t alone; any large entity, whether it’s corporations or universities, has the task of updating its systems on a seemingly glacial pace.
“It’s not a problem of the public sector, it’s a problem of large, distributed, bureaucratic, complex information technology structure, and that’s an equal-opportunity offender.”
Dell, in partnership with research firm Market Connections, conducted a blind online survey of 200 respondents from across civilian and defense agencies to see where the agencies were in terms of updating their server software.
The survey, conducted in July 2015, found that 32 percent of respondents said they would be running Windows 2003 server software beyond its end-of-life cycle. Another 18 percent said they weren’t sure if they’d be still running the software past its service date, leaving half of those polled potentially operating on outdated software.
Christman said that even with the extended support the IRS is receiving from Microsoft, security will still be an issue for the servers needing an update.
“They are a liability, pretty much as soon as the support ends,” he said. “So even with the extended support, you are going to be able to get someone from Microsoft on the phone, but there are not going to be publishing extra patches.”
The great challenge of updating software across a large organization is not simply applying the update but is identifying all of the properties requiring software changes, testing whether applications used now will be compatible with the new software and migrating the information in a way that won’t disrupt operations.
“If you go through Dulles airport, there’s all of those flat screens that show what flights have been delayed, there’s an application that runs behind that,” Christman said.
“I’ve walked through Dulles airport and sometimes those screens are offline and it’s showing a Windows XP client operating system. Windows XP hasn’t been updated in years, but it’s still in place. It’s there because the application that was written relies on it, that application hasn’t been tested to be migrated to the new platform.”
But that change still has to occur, and the survey shows that feds are aware. Thirty-four percent of respondents said their systems were completely upgraded while another 55 percent said they were in the process of upgrading servers.
Christman added that the industry is tacking toward virtual server systems that will be more dependent on central IT, and, therefore, easier to upgrade, eliminating problems that agencies are facing now. Those agencies just have to get to their information systems to the point where they can operate on the new systems.
“It’s just a fact of these large organizations, hundreds of thousands of people in an organization and an IT methodology needs better controls,” he said. “We’re helping people get through this problem, that’s one of the things that we do.”
