Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 13 April 2017
164. Deputy Dara Calleary asked the Minister for Social Protection the amount provided under the capital plan for the information technology infrastructure across his Department; the amount spent to date; the progress to date; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [19290/17]
Amharc ar fhreagraMy Department is a major user of Information Technology and has made significant investment in supporting technical infrastructure over previous years. The final agreed capital funding available for investment in information technology infrastructure and office equipment in 2016 was €10.4m and €8m in 2017.
The Department has agreed capital allocations for the remaining period of the Capital Plan ‘Building on Recovery: Infrastructure and Capital Investment 2016-2021’ i.e. 2018 - €9m; 2019- €9m; 2020 - €8m and 2021 - €8m. However, the specific breakdown for information technology infrastructure has still to be determined.
From January 2016 to end March 2017 the Department spent €9.8m in supporting technical infrastructure. The following outlines the progress made in 2016 and the key areas that the Department intends focussing on in 2017.
- Building on the significant investment made in 2016 there will be further investment in 2017 on the infrastructure in direct use by staff. During 2016 some 4,000 new PCs were deployed, almost 600 PCs were upgraded, 786 laptops were made available to staff and 2,170 scanners were installed. The investment in the PCs was made to replace obsolete equipment and to deliver far more processing power at the desktop in support of business initiatives under the digital agenda. The laptops were made available to field working staff to facilitate access to up-to-date data and to reduce maintenance of paper files. The scanners are being deployed to allow capture of electronic versions of documents and reduce the size of the Department’s paper data holdings. This investment will continue in 2017 but on a lesser scale given that this was a major focus area in 2016.
- There will be further investment in new storage technology. The volume of data that the Department maintains continues to grow. Data that was hitherto retained on paper is now being captured electronically and maintained centrally. The investment in storage will be in traditional disk storage and also in WORM (Write Once Read Many) and solid state storage. The investment in WORM will be used to store scanned images. The solid state technology will be deployed in support of big data initiatives and to help improve batch performance.
- All of the Departments offices are connected back to the central data centres located in Dublin. Building on the investment already made in the Department’s Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) there will be a major focus in 2017 on the Wide Area Network (WAN) and on delivering new and upgraded network links to these offices and to build varying degrees of resilience to these offices based on their workloads. This will be a major investment for the Department in 2017 and will deliver high-bandwidth links that will sustain the Department for some years to come.
- The demand for computer room servers is ever present. The investment here in 2017 will be targeted at replacing old equipment and on delivering new computer servers configured to best industry standards to support a range of business functions.
- The Department’s Unified Communications strategy is focused on centralising its telecommunications services and carrying all voice traffic over the main network. There will be investment therefore in hardware and software infrastructure during 2017 in support of this strategy.
- There was a major focus in 2016 on investment in security technology. New anti-malware / anti-virus software was deployed to all devices. A significant investment was made in new firewalls to further strengthen and maintain perimeter security. There will be continued investment in this area in 2017 to ensure that the Department’s security systems stay current.
- As part of its commitment to the Digital Agenda the Department will start an investment in self-service technology during 2017. The objective here will be to build on the services available through MyWelfare.ie and to facilitate facilitated and non-facilitated engagement by the customer with the services of the Department.
- Finally there were smaller investments made in such areas as computer room racking cabinetry, provision of printing services, purchase of software licences and provision of ancillary equipment.
