Jun 22, 2023 | Posted by Abdul-Rahman Oladimeji
The States of Guernsey in the United Kingdom discovered that a series of IT disruptions were caused by the inability of backup systems and the use of outdated equipment. Between November and January, the authorities of the British Isles experienced four disruptions, rendering the state's website inaccessible and disrupting internal systems. According to reports, no data was lost as a consequence of the incidents, but a number of institutions, the boarding card system at Guernsey Airport, and benefit payments were affected.
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) conducted an analysis of the outages and concluded that the data center was substantially out of date and that the States needed to implement significant changes to improve future resilience. The ambiguous ownership of the States' data center infrastructure and who was responsible for maintenance were among the issues identified. Because of this, when one of the two air conditioning units malfunctioned in June, it was still unrepaired in November when the other unit also failed, leaving the IT devices without cooling.
The evaluation uncovered delays in migrating older systems to new data centers as a result of the age of the majority of the equipment. In addition, the UPS and generator maintenance contracts had expired over a year ago. The hospital's and Edward T. Wheadon House's data centers also caused two near-miss incidents in the States. Thereafter, it appears that no action was taken to strengthen the infrastructure. States of Guernsey had signed a 10-year, $254.4 million contract with IT provider Agilisys in 2019, but this evidently did not include maintenance responsibilities.