The lack of emergency back-up systems at Liverpool Council
has shocked the council's political leaders.
Councillor Joe Anderson, Labour leader of the council, said, "It is
unbelievable that a simple thing such as back-up has not been
addressed. We are lucky nothing has happened, as it could have
caused huge financial loss and embarrassment."
The risk was highlighted in a report from the district auditor. "In
the event of a disaster at the datacentre, the council would not be
able to instigate an acceptable back-up service," it said.
"There is no generator back-up for power outages and, in the event
of a power failure, the emergency power system provides 30 minutes
back-up."
The council, which set up Liverpool Direct, a joint technology
venture with BT Global Services in 2001, has been forced to rush
the roll-out of a £400,000 back-up system with BT. Work will
start on 1 April, with completion due in 16 weeks.
A council spokesman said off-site back-up had not been addressed
until the district auditor's report, because the first priority was
to consolidate the authority's disparate IT systems, which includes
230 applications, 120 servers and 500 databases into one Oracle 8i
database.
"When the joint venture was signed, IT at the council was in dire
straits and the first priority was sorting out the different
systems into one Oracle database," he said.
"We accept that [a back-up system] is something we need to do, but
it is difficult to create a single datacentre and a back-up when
you are doing all that."
BT said it had installed back-up data servers in 2002 but they are
housed in the same building as the other IT systems.
"The first stage of the [disaster recovery] strategy was deployed
in January 2002, the second stage is in progress with the
implementation of a back-up site, which will provide further
resilience and assurance," a spokesman said.