The federal government's super-IT department says data was never put at risk when servers failed and network equipment at a new data centre failed to perform to specification earlier this year.
The problems at the data centre at CFB Borden meant the digital firewall designed to protect against malicious actors was running, but wasn't always easily or readily available, according to internal government documents.
Ted Francis, a spokesman for Shared Services Canada, said backup firewalls were always available even while the department worked to correct problems at the data centre after complaints from the Public Service Commission that its systems were running slow and affecting the commission's ability to do its work.
The problems came after the commission had its systems moved from a data centre in the heart of the national capital to one on the military base north of Toronto.
Francis said no other departments were affected by the problems at the Borden data centre and no data were ever put at risk.
In late February, the Public Service Commission had its digital infrastructure moved to the Borden data centre from one in downtown Ottawa.
The briefing note to the then-president of Shared Services Canada says the commission "experienced multiple outages" of their system along with "immediate, ongoing degradation in application performance."
The physical distance between Borden and the commission's downtown Ottawa office meant it took longer for information to travel between the servers and front-line workers. A cable was also cut due to a "construction error outside of SSC's control," Francis said.
To prevent a repeat, workers installed a second cable and tested both cables to make sure that service wouldn't go down should either be cut in the future.
"The remainder of the infrastructure has been tested and configured to meet the service requirements," Francis said.
The previous Conservative government created the super-IT department in 2011 with the aim of consolidating data centres and email systems, saying it would save the government millions annually by streamlining infrastructure and eliminating duplication.
It was also designed to eliminate aging infrastructure and cut down on the number of vulnerabilities in the system that could give malicious hackers an easy way into government networks.
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Quelle/Source: Bay Today, 31.10.2015
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