Chapter 5 – Enterprise Architectures{0}
Managing Enterprise Architectures – Virginia disrupted by IT Outage
On Wednesday, August 25 Virginia was affected by an information technology outage.
The Virginia Information Technology Agencies (VITA) works together with the Northrop Grumman Corporations to oversee and maintain the State’s IT operations.
When a storage area network (SAN) went down on Wednesday, about 13 percent of important files from 27 state government agencies, like the department of taxation, the state board of elections or the DMV went missing. The Department of Motor Vehicles was most badly affected because of large and complex databases. Because of the complex files it took a long time to recover the information. According to the DMV website, the customer service centres were unable to process any driver’s licenses or ID cards for a few days, because of the loss of important files. It took nearly a week to recover all the data.
When the Virginia Information Technology Agencies decided to outsource IT operations to a private company, like the Northrop Grumman Corporations, there were already some doubts about the safety and effectiveness of the collaboration.
According to the VITA, the outage was unpredictable and nobody thought that there could be such big problems. When choosing the hardware, the manufacturer of the used backup and recovery system reports to the VITA, that the technology is really reliable and that there has never happened a failure.
The article correlates very well with Chapter 5 because it talks about backup and recovery strategies. Considering this article about a big loss of information because of an outage, we can see that it’s really important that companies think about a good backup and recovery plan. Data protection should be performed constituently and as possible also autonomous.
Therefore it’s important that the companies have the appropriate hardware that comes along with the needs of the enterprises.
Jana Knab
Sources:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/state-local/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227200047