(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The Texas secretary of state’s office has cut short its relationship with IBM (www.ibm.com) after it allegedly failed to protect state information under an $863 million data center consolidation contract, according to a report from the Austin American-Statesman.
A server crash in August led to a 13-day outage of the agency’s business records filing system. This incident signaled the secretary of state to serious weaknesses in IBM’s ability to recover lost data, secretary of state spokesman Randall Dillard told the American-Statesman. “We couldn’t allow the ability to conduct fair, credible elections to be jeopardized,” Dillard said.
Dillard and other worry that had a similar failure affected Texas’ voter registration data during an election, the state’s counties would not be able to verify new voters. In its place, the secretary of state’s office is electing to set up its own $7.9 million data operation, which includes two separate backup locations, payed for by federal government funds that pay for the mandated state-wide voter registration system.
The report notes that not only has the secretary of state expressed frustration with the project, but also the majority of the 27 agencies involved in the data center consolidation. According to a poll taken in the spring, 88 percent of the agencies’ IT directors were dissatisfied with the services provided by IBM.
