The U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently announced plans to hire 1,000 IT workers for its Customs and Border Patrol Office of Information Technology with a focus on skills to help the agency move to a service-oriented architecture, according to Federal Computing Week.

The hires and move to SOA are part of the department's effort to modernize, become more efficient and cut IT costs, FCW reports. Customs and Border Patrol's IT budget has decreased $306 million in the past two years, but a focus on SOA could ease some of that pain.

“We are moving to an enterprise SOA environment leveraging applications and managed servers. We will stop building systems and build applications and services instead,” Ken Ritchhart, deputy assistant commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Information Technology, told FCW.

Many government agencies are turning to legacy modernization and SOA to cope with budget cuts. In a separate FCW report, the Department of Housing and Development CIO Jerry Williams said the organization is making strides to modernize after a long history of drawing criticism from the Government Accountability Office.