When 12 drives failed, it took down a system of over 800 disk drives, and a taxation agency with it.
The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has told Senate Estimates that when it hands down its report into the outage it suffered in December 2016, the finger of blame will be pointed squarely at the storage solution provided by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) .
“The turnkey service of data storage as per the 3PAR SAN provided by HPE failed us, ” Commissioner of Taxation Chris Jordan said.
Jordan said the report due to be released next week will state the fibre cables used were not “optimally fitted”, the drives used in the SAN had software bugs that made data inaccessible, and monitoring features were not turned on.
“The SAN design and configuration meant we had an overemphasis on performance features rather than stability or resilience — a relatively small disk drive failure had a large impact — only 12 of some 800 disk drives failed, but they impacted most ATO systems, ” Jordan said.
The Commissioner also admitted it took longer than it should have to restore the SAN, because the recovery tools were kept on the failed SAN.
Discussions on a settlement are complete, with the ATO recovering “key costs” and receiving “additional and higher grade IT equipment”.
The storage hardware in question was upgraded in November 2015 by HPE and was seen by the ATO to be “state-of- the-art” at the time, with the ATO noting last year it was “basically the same” hardware used by other large clients of HPE.
Earlier this month the ATO admitted the outage has caused it to roll back its use of application whitelisting.
“Whilst the ATO was fully compliant in November 2016 with whitelisting our Windows based servers, our current levels of compliance have been impacted by the ATO’s recent SAN outages, ” it said in a submission to the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Trust.
“In support of the full restoration and remediation program, whitelisting on a range of servers needed to be disabled and re-enabled as the restoration progresses. We have plans in place to progressively re-enable whitelisting in coming months taking into account tax time activities.”
The hardware issue also pushed back the ATO’s patch cycles, and whitelisting is set to be in place again by June.
The ATO also said this morning the rollout of its Single Touch Payroll over the coming years will allow for better data matching with Centrelink by providing data every payday, rather than at the end of the year.
“As I understand it, sometimes people that get benefits, [when they] get a job, keep getting the benefits. They assume the information is already being exchanged by the tax office and Centrelink because someone has taken tax out of their pay, they don’t know its at the end of the year Centrelink do the check and say: ‘You owe us $5,000′” he said.
“Single Touch Payroll will enable us and Centrelink to exchange information fortnightly.”
The embattled automated debt recovery system used by Centrelink is based on a 27-year-old process, which contained an error that was incorrectly calculating a recipient’s income, basing a recipient’s fortnightly pay on their annual salary rather than taking a cumulative 26-week snapshot of what an individual was paid.
From July 1, the welfare agency intends to expand the program to examine a range of incomes including interest on bank accounts, investment properties, share dividends, and rental incomes.
“It’s very likely the main people who will be caught up in this expansion of the system will be old age pensioners, ” Labor Senator Murray Watt said at a Senate inquiry earlier this month.
“No one has been able to convince this inquiry the system has been running so smoothly that we aren’t going to see a whole bunch of new problems emerge on July 1.”
The Department of Human Services has said the new measures are expected to save AU$980 million over three years.

Sentiment rank: -0

© Source: http://www.zdnet.com/article/hpe-san-behind-ato-outage-was-designed-for-performance-instead-of-stability/
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New research from Telsyte has found that six in 10 businesses with more than 20 employees in Australia and New Zealand are already using or thinking about deploying robotic process automation.
Enterprise investment in robotic process automation (RPA) is set to soar in Australia and New Zealand, according to new research from analyst firm Telsyte.
Based on insights provided by 302 CIOs and IT decision makers, the Telsyte ANZ Robotic Process Automation Study 2017 predicts the ANZ RPA market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 45 percent from AU$216 million in 2016 to AU$870 million in 2020.
The analyst firm said RPA — which enables software robots to replicate the actions of human workers for routine tasks — is now being used or investigated by six out of 10 ANZ organisations with more than 20 employees.
Additionally, 38 percent of organisations with more than 500 employees have active RPA programs in place.
The finance and insurance industries are expected to be the fastest adopters of RPA in the short term, according to Telsyte, although RPA can also be applied to industries with large customer support and request processing requirements, such as telecommunications and government.
Telsyte managing director Foad Fadaghi said RPA is not just about cutting overhead costs; it can also change the way organisations operate.
“A proof of concept is important for organisations to first understand the nature of processes that can be best solved through RPA, before progressing to an enterprise-wide strategy, ” Fadaghi suggested.
“Equally important is the use of pilot programs to understand the change management requirements before a further rollout.”
Telsyte also recommended that organisations assess the processes they would like to automate by their level of complexity.
“Complexity has a positive correlation with automation costs, and targeting lower-complexity processes initially can result in better initial returns, ” Telsyte said.
Fellow analyst firm Gartner has previously referred to RPA tools as “gateway technologies” or “surface tools”, because they simply skim the surface of the larger intelligent automation services market.
“The attraction is the RPA tool just sits on top of the legacy system” such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) , and there is no need for any special integration, Gartner research vice president and analyst at Frances Karamouzis told ZDNet.
“They’re also easy to use and have a relatively low cost. For all those reasons [RPA] has by far the highest adoption of automation tools that we’ve seen, ” Karamouzis added.
With the increase in enterprise investment in RPA, DXC Technology, a New York Stock Exchange-listed IT services company, announced the introduction of 60 new RPA experts in Australia and New Zealand.
“Organisations are looking for a way to bridge the gap between large funded digital transformation projects and the long tail of business processes attached to aging systems. RPA can achieve this with a virtual workforce that streamlines existing processes, lays the foundation for intelligent automation, and frees up employees for more engaging work, ” said Seelan Nayagam, managing director at DXC Technology ANZ.
The IT services company is now actively expanding in the ANZ region to guide clients implementing RPA.
“We are seeing a shift in our client’s focus from cost reduction and labour arbitrage, offered by more traditional outsourcing models, to driving business value through innovation, ” Nayagam said. “This includes RPA, and as a case in point, we have implemented RPA within DXC for automating our own shared service processes.”
While organisations in the ANZ region are believed to be at the “basic stages of adoption”, a 2016 Deloitte report indicates that enterprises internationally have begun to employ RPA together with cognitive technologies such as speech recognition, natural language processing, and machine learning to automate perceptual and judgement-based tasks once reserved for humans.
“The integration of cognitive technologies with RPA makes it possible to extend automation to processes that require perception or judgement, ” David Schatsky, managing director at Deloitte, previously said. “With the addition of natural language processing, chatbot technology, speech recognition, and computer vision technology, for instance, bots can extract and structure information from speech audio, text, or images and pass that structured information to the next step of the process.”
Additionally, machine learning can identify patterns and make predictions about process outcomes, helping RPA prioritise actions.
“Cognitive RPA has the potential to go beyond basic automation to deliver business outcomes such as greater customer satisfaction, lower churn, and increased revenues, ” Schatsky said.

Sentiment rank: 1.6

© Source: http://www.zdnet.com/article/robotic-process-automation-market-to-reach-au870m-in-anz-by-2020-telsyte/
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