ASIC works through Business Register outages

The Australian Register of Business Names has suffered a series of scheduled and unscheduled outages since its major revamp in May.

The register's operator, the Australian Security and Investments Commission (ASIC), this week reported recovering from a document delivery issue that caused up to six days of downtime for users.

The issue was related to an unscheduled outage on Saturday August 18 that was fixed by Accenture the following Monday.

The fix was introduced to the production environment four days later after a test regime, though it took until August 25 to clear a backlog of correspondence about the issue.

Additional scheduled outages added functionality or fixed problems including data quality issues, according to an ASIC spokesman.

In July, the availability of Business Names search during supported hours was 98.5 percent, he said, which equated to approximately 11 hours of downtime.

The rollout of the revamped $68.5 million national business names system proved to be “a large and challenging programme of work”, the spokesman said.

Data migrated into the new register covered over 80 million records of varying quality from eight State and Territory systems.

“As we communicated to our stakeholders early on, we expected some teething issues to occur in the transition, which we are closing monitoring, investigating and fixing,” he said. 

“We are continuing to work to improve the quality of the data available for searching on the new national register.”