Virus scan locks NSW FACS staff out of corporate systems

A simple virus scan stopped NSW child welfare and community services workers in their tracks yesterday, blocking many from connecting to the corporate systems they need to perform their day-to-day duties.

iTnews understands a number of NSW Family and Community Services (FACS) staff members were sent home because they could not get access to their work PCs following an outagebetween 8:00 am and 1:00pm yesterday.

FACS is the state government agency in charge of child protection, disability services, social housing and aboriginal outcomes in NSW, employing roughly 17,000 staff members throughout regional and metropolitan sites.

A spokesperson for the department confirmed it suffered an outage to its Citrix remote desktop software that was traced back to a virus scan launched by Citrix in FACS' data centre.

“Citrix stores its configuration on a disk storage system in our data centres. The disk storage array was running slowly due to a device-initiated virus scan," the spokesperson said.

“FACS ICT and vendor technicians have remedied the situation and are currently making the system available for all users to logon."

Workers that were already accessing the FACS network through Citrix when the outage hit maintained the connections as long as they kept the session open, but others were locked out.

iTnews understands some staff could access email but not shared network drives that store client documents.

FACS is currently in the midst of a daunting migration of its core SAP ERP systems out of its current primary facility in Global Switch’s Ultimo data centre and onto a cloud-based platform hosted in the Metronode-run GovDC sites in Unanderra and Silverwater.

All NSW government agencies are required to move into one of the GovDC facilities by 2017.

The FACS ERP switch is due to be completed by the end of this year. It is being delivered and supported by Accenture under a $54 million deal that runs until 2024.