You’ve gotta wonder.......
ATO commissions review after ‘worst unplanned outage in recent memory’
Independent ‘end to end’ review into storage failure
Rohan Pearce
16 December 2016
The Australian Taxation Office will commission a review by an independent expert to investigate the root causes of a widespread outage that saw the ATO’s core systems rendered inaccessible for several days.
The agency revealed earlier this week that a storage failure took down its website and other key services, including the Tax Agent Portal.
The failure of an HP Enterprise SAN rolled out in November 2015 was compounded when the ATO’s backup storage system didn’t automatically kick in.
“The failure of our back-up arrangements meant that restoration and resumption of data and services has been very complex and time consuming,” Commissioner of Taxation Chris Jordan said in a statement issued today.
He described it as the ATO's “worst unplanned system outage in recent memory ”.
Jordan said that the failure, which the ATO believes has not been encountered anywhere else in the world, has not led to the loss of any data.
“The issues we have experienced this week do not relate to our overall IT capability or skills,” the commissioner said.
Jordan said that no taxpayers will be disadvantaged because of the outage, and all refunds that were due to issue when the system went down on 12 December have now been processed and will be paid today and tomorrow.
He added that there may be some intermittent performance issues as ATO and HPE continue to work on restoring systems.
A draft scope of an “end-to-end” review into the outage states that the independent reviewer will examine what happened and why, and what needs to happen to ensure the ATO and the community are not exposed to this type of incident in the future”.
http://www.microsourcing.com.au/updates/201409/ato-considers-offshore-outsourcing-it-work-to-ph.asp
ATO Considers Offshore Outsourcing IT Work to PH
by: Arline Ramirez
Monday, September 15, 2014 | Outsourcing News |
The Australian Taxation Office is considering outsourcing IT work to the Philippines. The agency visited business process outsourcing (BPO) company Accenture to assess its capabilities.
An ATO spokeswoman said the offshore outsourcing proposal is part of the agency's current contract with Accenture to use its Global Delivery Network for application development and testing. She added that there will be no job cuts or replacement of ATO employees if the proposal is accepted. Offshore outsourcing is being considered because of its value for money.
The arrangement would be similar to the Health Department's IT outsourcing deal. Actual data will not be sent offshore.
ATO emphasised that the deal is still in the proposal stage. The Australian government has been considering privatisation and offshore outsourcing to reduce the cost for taxpayers. The Abbot government is also considering outsourcing Medicare and PBS payments.
The ATO noted that they have not made a decision yet on the proposal.