Question NW411 to the Minister of Home Affairs
03 March 2022 - NW411
Tito, Ms LF to ask the Minister of Home Affairs
In view of the fact that the Chief Executive Officer of the State Information Technology Agency indicated in September 2021 that his department’s choice of cheap network connectivity plan was to blame for the department’s perennial connectivity problems, what measures has he put in place to correct the anomaly?
Reply:
The contracted network service level agreement with SITA is for a bronze service level agreement that should provide 95% service availability, where by if the systems are down it must be resolved within 16 hours. Unfortunately, there are times when the resolutions of systems that are down takes SITA up to 3-5 days to resolve. This means that even under the low level of bronze we are not necessary getting what we signed for. It is true that SITA argued that we need to move to gold. Our question is if even the low bronze standard can’t be met at that low level, how will a gold standard at a higher level be met.
In order to answer this question, the Department and SITA undertook to conduct a proof of concept (POC) on the Gold Service Level Agreement in five selected offices in order to determine if the move to a higher SLA will lead to an improved network connectivity in those office. The outcome of the proof of concept is awaited and will determine if it was a success or not.
END