Availability and Resiliency of Government's Digital Services
Prime Minister's OfficeSpeakers
Summary
This question concerns the availability and resiliency of Government digital services, as raised by Mr Shawn Huang Wei Zhong. Senior Minister of State Dr Janil Puthucheary noted that unscheduled downtime was below 0.1% in 2021, with systems primarily hosted on resilient commercial clouds. Critical services utilize additional backup hardware, network links, and monitoring tools, while agencies regularly exercise incident management plans for rapid recovery. To mitigate sustained outages, government agencies provide alternative access to critical transactions through offline, in-person, or telephone channels. These measures aim to ensure high system availability while providing reliable alternatives for the public during technical disruptions.
Transcript
10 Mr Shawn Huang Wei Zhong asked the Prime Minister with the increased digitalisation of Government services (a) what are the measures to ensure the availability and resiliency of these systems; and (b) what alternatives are available to the public for continued access to critical services when there is a sustained system and service outage.
The Senior Minister of State for Communications and Information (Dr Janil Puthucheary) (for the Prime Minister): Mr Speaker, unscheduled downtime of Government digital services occurs infrequently, affecting service availability less than 0.1% of the time in 2021. Among services that experienced unscheduled downtime, the median cumulative downtime for the whole of 2021 was four hours. This is partly because the majority of Government systems providing services to the public have been moved to commercial cloud hosting platforms, which have high availability. And these platforms, and the services that run on them, are designed for better availability.
For systems which provide critical services, there are further measures to better ensure high availability and resilience. For example, backup hardware and network links, as well as monitoring tools to detect and alert system owners of potential problems.
When systems go down, we seek to detect the outage quickly and recover service availability fast, while mitigating the impact of the outage. Government agencies have ICT incident management plans and exercise them regularly. Agencies may also activate measures to allow citizens to perform critical transactions offline, in-person or over the phone.