Dive Brief:

• Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey vetoed legislation that would have forced state agency IT leaders to adopt cloud technology, according to the Wall Street Journal.

• The bill, which was approved by both the state house and the state senate earlier this month, would have required all state agencies to devise a cloud migration plan by January of next year.

• Ducey said while he agreed on the legislation’s goals of upgrading the state’s legacy technology, he did not agree on the bill’s strategy for doing so.

Dive Insight:

The bill also would have required state agencies to send regular progress reports to the state CIO and require agencies to use a “cloud-first” philosophy when considering any new IT projects or products

Ducey said in a statement that the bill added “extra layers of bureaucracy that were unnecessary and will stall needed advancements in technology.”

The use of legacy computer systems in government is an ongoing problem that can leave agencies poorly protected from cyberattacks and result in monetary waste. A report released last week by the Government Accountability Office found the federal government spends almost 75% of its $80 billion federal IT budget on operations and maintenance of legacy systems.

But cloud technology is not necessarily the end-all, be-all solution to upgrading legacy systems, experts say. A recent report from cloud solutions provider RightScale found that many businesses now rely on the cloud for storing valuable data. Sometimes, that requires organizations to shift between public cloud providers, or to a hybrid model, and each migration brings an additional wave of integration challenges, the report found.