Pam Wolfe, the chief of the Enterprise Services Division in the NASA Shared services office, spoke recently about the agency’s cyber challenges.
She noted that federal agencies spend about 72 percent of the IT budget on maintaining legacy IT systems, leaving a smaller margin for investment in innovation, and R&D. The private sector, by contrast, spends only about 30-35 percent of its IT budget on maintenance.
She said the organization’s investment in Robotics Process Automation has proven to be a major cybersecurity “game changer” for the agency. RPA can save human employees from having to conduct rote tasks like password resets, system maintenance, and data cleansing. RPA could also someday help keep track of the inventory of applications across NASA.