NASA spent $1.4 billion, or 7.6 percent of its $18.5 billion budget, on information technology, but continues to struggle with security and governance, according to the space agency’s annual report.
The report highlights how NASA has struggled with managing its roughly 500 information systems for controlling spacecraft, collecting and processing data and enabling basic enterprise functions such as collaboration.
In the report, NASA noted:
Over the last 7 years, we have issued 24 audit reports containing over 119 recommendations designed to improve NASA’s IT governance and IT security efforts. Although the Agency has made progress in this area, we remain concerned about the state of the Agency’s IT governance, its acquisition of IT systems, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, IT security incident detection and handling capabilities, continuous monitoring tools, cloud-computing services, and web application security.
