CenITex says Victorian Government data is safe

An article on a Victorian gossip website last week accused CenITex of being unable to run backups for all five Government agencies it serves in a single night.

CeniTex provides most of the IT needs of the Victorian departments of Treasury and Finance, Transport, Premier and Cabinet, Primary Industries, Planning and Community Development and Sustainability and Environment.

CenITex director of corporate communications Ross Gilmour denied there were any issues with CenITex's back-up procedures.

"CenITex runs a regular backup regime for all customers, which generally consists of differential backups run on a daily basis and full backups run on a weekly basis," Gilmour said.

"There are some applications and databases that CenITex runs full backups of daily."

A differential backup sends only that data that was changed since the last backup.

Gilmour said that backup data is written to tape on automatic tape libraries in a remote enterprise data centre. Tapes are taken to a third-party secure tape-storage facility.

Data is only replicated elsewhere when required by the application, he said.

CenITex's government customers "should be very confident that their data is protected", he said.

"They are not required to take their own measures."

The other criticism was that applications unique to each agency are not backed up as part of CenITex's standard operating environment (SOE).

Gilmour told iTnews that application maintenance and support is "a line of business responsibility", which is a standard industry practice.

"Applications beyond the base SOE can be managed by CenITex on a fee for service basis," he said. "The business has the flexibility to manage its own applications."