The Assistant Director: Law and Governance and interim Senior Information Risk Owner (SIRO) introduced his report that provided Members with a progress update on actions taken by Digital Officers to remove and mitigate risk associated with underinvestment in IT infrastructure in the past. He informed that the former Head of Digital  and SIRO had provided a verbal report to the Committee at its 30 January 2017 (minute 43 refers), and that Members had subsequently requested a written report and attendance of a senior member of Digital to attend the June meeting.

The Assistant Director: Law and Governance and interim Senior Information Risk Owner (SIRO) referred Members to Appendix 1 of his report, informing that the Data Centre Review IT (project 15054) under implementation currently showed no expected signs of slippage, and delivery for completion was scheduled for 29 September 2017. The project included use of the Merseytravel datacentre as part of the Council’s IT Contingency and Disaster Recovery.

Mr George Mallam, Business Change Manager and Project Manager for the Data Centre Review IT project informed the Committee of key elements of the project, namely:

• Use of 2 data centres to improve resilience;
• Compression of computer data racks from 22 to 8 (due to a mixture of available space and improvements in computer technology);
• Simplification of IT Structures;
• Reduction of the number of servers required from 33 to 4; and
• Transfer of Production Services.

Members questioned the Business Change Manager on specific elements of risk i.e. recent well publicised cyber-attacks and data security, and whether the Council had been affected in any way. Members were assured that as a result of the Council’s current systems, no such attacks had been successful and no loss of service had occurred.

The Assistant Director: Law and Governance and interim Senior Information Risk Owner (SIRO) informed Members that a further update report would be presented to the next meeting of the Audit and Risk management Committee, and that information on the project would be circulated to Members outside of the Committee meeting cycle.

Resolved – That the report be noted.

Councillor Les Rowlands declared a pecuniary interest in this item by virtue of his membership of Merseytravel. He left the meeting room whilst the matter was debated.