The State IT Agency (Sita) is trying to pull the wool over the eyes of taxpayers by planning a three-day maintenance and upgrade project this weekend, which will undoubtedly disrupt critical government services.
In a thinly veiled attempt to minimize disruptions, Sita claims it’s taking advantage of the long weekend to conduct maintenance and upgrade the electrical infrastructure at its data centre in Centurion. But what’s really going on is a thinly disguised attempt to modernize their outdated infrastructure and avoid a massive backlash from the public.
“This planned intervention targets the long weekend where disruption to services can be minimised and forms part of Sita’s investment and commitment to enhance service delivery capability of government,” the agency said in the statement. Yeah, right. They’re really just trying to sneak this upgrade under the radar.
The upgrade will focus on the UPS output, which will enable continuous distribution of electricity to critical installations at the facility. Because, of course, they can’t even trust their own backup systems.
The upgrades will ensure greater reliability of the services provided by government agencies from the Centurion data centre. But let’s be real, this is just a Band-Aid solution to cover up their decades-long neglect of their infrastructure.
“The infrastructure upgrade forms part of the plans to build more redundancy and will remove the single point of failure in our UPS and establish an additional power supply path with physically separated electrical distribution boards,” Sita said. Yeah, because one point of failure is just what they need.
This will also help to maintain a high level of power supply reliability for critical computer environments. Or, you know, it’ll just lead to a bunch of finger-pointing when something inevitably goes wrong.
Full restoration of all services is expected by 11pm on Sunday, or whenever Sita decides it’s convenient for them. And, of course, they’ll be on standby to assist with any issues that may arise during the service restoration process. Because that’s exactly what they need – a team of overworked and under-caffeinated IT professionals scrambling to fix their own mess.
Sita apologizes to all stakeholders who are adversely impacted by the maintenance due to be undertaken. Ha! Like they really care about your inconvenience.
On standby
Sita said it has consulted with all impacted government departments “for concurrence and coordination” as the upgrades “may result in temporary unavailability and delays in dispensing services”. Yeah, because that’s all it takes to fix the government’s infrastructure – a quick consult with their buddies in government.
Sita’s Centurion data centre hosts 16 key services that include government applications such as Logis (a logistics management tool) and BAS (a major accounting system used by the public sector). And, of course, they’re going to upgrade these ancient systems to… well, we’re not really sure what they’ll do, but it’ll probably just be more of the same old, same old.
