ATO warms disaster recovery site

The move will involve handing off some of the processing power contained within the platform to the ATO’s internal analytics team, according to Rhonda Bradford, a senior data architect in the Office of the Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO), ATO.

"We’re looking at assisting our analytics people to have more power and control by putting them on the disaster recovery platform," said Bradford.

"A by-product of doing this is that our focus on reporting will no longer severely impact the analytics environment."

Bradford said the ATO’s move to a warm DR environment is based on the assumption that the organisation’s requirement for a DR platform ‘is very low’.

She told delegates at the DW 2.0 Asia Pacific Summit in Sydney that ATO ‘had only had one incident [to date] where we really needed a DR system’.

An ATO spokesperson added: “Although the likelihood of major downtime is low, the consequences of a significant outage are far greater. Opportunities, however, do exist to make effective use of the additional capacity this provides.”

Bradford also acknowledged the risks of opening DR capacity to production applications. Typically, these may include that regular users take over the capacity to the point where the platform is no longer suitable for its original DR purpose - and therefore the organisation no longer has a suitable DR resource.

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