NASA's CIO On Managing IT In The Final Frontier

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F ew organizations in the country manage as vast an array of information and communications as NASA. With incoming data from Voyager probes outside the solar system, images from Mars rovers and messaging and scientific data from the International Space Station and NASA's 10 field centers around the country, the agency wrangles some 113 petabytes of data– 5 times the amount stored in theLibrary of Congress. Responsible for it all is Jeff Seaton, NASA's chief information officer, who oversees a billion dollar budget and 700 employees across the organization.

Seaton has been with the space agency since 1991, when he started as a robotics engineer. He took on the role of chief technology officer at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia in 2004, rising to become that center's CIO. By 2021 he was CIO of the entire agency. Since taking the role, Seaton has focused on modernizing NASA's digital infrastructure, which landed him on this year's Forbes CIO Next List .

Recently, Seaton sat down with Forbes to discuss some of the challenges of managing IT for the space agency. Below are some of the highlights from that conversation, which have been edited and condensed for clarity.

We have our Voyager spacecraft that are farther away from this planet than any other human created entity. There's no way we're going to upgrade the computers on the them. … And we just have to do our best to mitigate any potential threats because things that were designed 30 years ago never could anticipate the environment that we're in today. And so we've got a lot of creative people in our mission space that are thinking about that all the time.

We had thousands of websites…So starting back in about 2019, we took a look at the overall web footprint and focused on where we had the most interest. And we were able, after several years of effort, to roll out a more modern and more public-focused web presence. That really allowed us to focus the message of NASA in a way that the general public would be able to appreciate and understand.