Handling of computer meltdown praised
Minister says Service Alberta mobilized quickly
EDMONTON — The new deputy minister of Service Alberta says the department did “a great job” handling the catastrophic meltdown of government computer systems in the explosion and fire at the Shaw Communications headquarters last July.
Jay Ramotar, who took over responsibilities for the department in December, rejected criticisms of the ministry’s response to the crisis, saying it can do better but noting most important government systems were back online in a day or two.
“I thought they did a great job,” he said after addressing an all-party legislature committee Wednesday. “They mobilized very quickly.”
The blaze and computer shutdown at the Calgary building on July 11 knocked out several Alberta Health Services systems, disabled the city’s 311 call centre temporarily and disrupted services to provincial registry offices for days.
In an interview, Ramotar said not all government systems need to be back online within hours because the backup systems required to do that are costly.
While opposition critics have blasted the government for failing to adequately plan for an information technology emergency, the deputy minister said the province didn’t have all its computer system eggs in one basket.
Most critical systems are housed in an Alberta Infrastructure building south of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, he said.
Ramotar told the Standing Committee on Public Accounts the government will not pay compensation to service providers who had to shut down because of the computer system crash. “At this time I am not aware of any requests and when you don’t have any requests, you can’t consider it,” he added in an interview.
Shaw officials have said the fire and resulting repairs cost the company $26 million, including $6 million for data restoration and recovery.
A Service Alberta assistant deputy minister told the committee its service provider in the building, IBM, covered the financial hit stemming from the explosion and fire, except for overtime for government employees working to get the systems back online.
About 150 applications or systems were hosted at the IBM site, but no data was lost, said Kate Rozmahel.
“The good news is we had done a lot of preparation ... so we were able to bring the systems back up in a short period of time,” she said.
“After we were through recovering all those systems, we undertook a complete review of what happened at Shaw Court and a number of recommendations have been found and we’re working through what to do going forward.”
A department off icial said Wednesday that registry data is still being stored at the Shaw building. Ramotar said his staff are working with other departments to ensure they have their computer systems backed up with redundant systems.
Owen Voaklander, executive director of commercial operations with Association of Alberta Registry Agents, said the department has reassured his group there won’t be another outage of systems that the public relies on for over eight million transactions a year.
“They found out that their systems didn’t quite work, so they need to look at things like real time backup,” Voaklander said.
Meanwhile, Alberta’s auditor general and the province’s privacy commissioner are both investigating the incident and its aftermath.
Brian Hamilton, director of health information with the privacy commissioner’s office, said he expects to make several pointed recommendations on how the province can better protect Albertans’ privacy when he releases his fire report in two months.
Assistant auditor general Ed Ryan said the fire is the focus of the government watchdog’s wider review of provincial disaster recovery planning that will be finished this fall.