Issue - meetings

IT Disaster Recovery Scrutiny Review

Meeting: 07/11/2016 - Cabinet (Item 59)

59 IT Disaster Recovery Scrutiny Review pdf icon PDF 94 KB

Additional documents:

Minutes:

AnnMcLaughlin

Councillor Ann McLachlan, Cabinet Member – Transformation, Leisure and Culture, said:

 

“Ensuring Wirral’s IT systems are fit for purpose and robust, with adequate safeguards in place to continue providing services when issues occur is incredibly important.

 

I am grateful to the Members who took part in this scrutiny review and believe their work and the recommendations it has led to will be hugely valuable”.

 

 

Councillor Ann McLachlan introduced a report, which set out the findings of a scrutiny review that had been set up to review the Council’s IT disaster recovery arrangements.  The review had been commissioned by the former Transformation and Resources Policy and Performance Committee and then approved and referred to the Cabinet by the Business Overview and Scrutiny Committee at its meeting on 12 July 2016.  The report set out a series of recommendations that the Scrutiny Panel had put forward to help improve the Council’s response to disaster recovery.

 

The Cabinet noted that this work supported enabling project activities to support the delivery of the Wirral Plan. 

 

Appended to the report were the Disaster Recovery Scrutiny Review Minute Extract, the report to the Business Overview and Scrutiny Committee on 12 July 2016 and the Scrutiny Review Report.

 

Councillor McLachlan informed that Councillor Adam Sykes, the Chair of the Scrutiny Review Panel, had been invited to this meeting to present the report but unfortunately had been unable to attend.  Councillor McLachlan also informed that the Panel had carried out an excellent piece of task and finish work.  It had been described as forward thinking and all of the recommendations set out in the Scrutiny Review Report had been accepted.  The work to ensure the Council had a robust plan had been going on for some time.  The key issue was continuity which involved well thought out and managed plans.  As part of this there was a mammoth task of the upgrade to Office 365 and the moving of data into the Cloud.  This would be done in chunks.

 

Councillor McLachlan commended and thanked all those Members and Officers who had been involved with this outstanding Report.

 

RESOLVED: That:

 

(1)  the findings of the Report be endorsed and all the recommendations arising from this review be approved;

 

(2)  the progress made since 2014 to address the historic weaknesses across the Wirral Council ICT estate and to improve the Council’s ability to cope with and recover from a variety of Business Continuity risks be noted; and

 

(3)  a future report is brought back to Cabinet by the Chief Information Officer setting out how the Council is responding to this review and taking forward this work.