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Texas cuts IBM contract due to security concerns
By siliconindia
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Friday, 06 November 2009, 22:08 IST |
31 Comments
New Delhi: The U.S. state, Texas, has reportedly pulled its voter registration system out of an ongoing $863 million datacenter consolidation project being handled by technology giant IBM. Texas Secretary of State's office is said to have cut the project because of data security and disaster recoverability fears.
According to ComputerWorld, the decision was prompted by an incident in August when a server being managed by IBM crashed resulting in a 13-day outage of the office's business records filing system.
As a result of the concerns expressed by the Secretary of State's office, Texas Governor Rick Perry and the state's Department of Information Resources, which is overseeing the IBM contract, gave permission for the agency to withdraw its election systems from the contract. Following its withdrawal from the IBM project, the agency will set up its own datacenter with two separate back-up locations.
IBM started working on the project for the Secretary of State's office in November 2004 and was supposed to have been completed by January 2006. Under the contract, IBM was supposed to have helped Texas build a statewide voter registration system that would be complaint with Help America Vote Act standards. The new system known as the Texas Election Administration Management (TEAM) system will replace the existing Texas Voter Registration System.
