Q FM Africa's Modern Radio
Margret Mwanakatwe
Finance Minister Margaret Mwanakatwe has confirmed that the Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS) at her ministry failed on Monday, 29th January, 2018 at about 22:00hrs.
Ms. Mwanakatwe has told Parliament in a ministerial statement that since then, the system has not been available for business use.
She says the failure was not deliberate, but a degeneration of the equipment (hardware) that resulted in data on the affected damaged portions being corrupted, thereby, causing the system to fail.
Ms. Mwanakatwe has attributed this to the old age of the equipment which has reached its end of useful life.
She says government has already taken steps to replace the old equipment.
Ms. Mwanakatwe sys the new equipment has already been installed and the process to migrate the system from the old equipment to the new hardware has already commenced.
She says the restoration has taken a bit of time because of the extent of damage on the equipment.
She has also disclosed that efforts to restore the system using backup data failed because it was discovered that the data for recent backup also contained some corrupted data as the damage to the equipment had taken place over a period of time.
Ms. Mwanakatwe further adds that efforts to restore the system using the disaster recovery (DR) site also failed because the data stored on the DR was replicated with the same corrupted data from the main system.