Media release from The Guernsey Chamber of Commerce
28th November 2022
Guernsey’s Chamber of Commerce note severe IT disruption at the States of Guernsey, which having commenced on Friday 25th November is now entering its fourth day
The failure of the States of Guernsey to restore critical digital services on a timely basis has caused real world disruption to business, the third sector and all private citizens, not to mention the loss of productive time in the public sector.
There has been no substantive explanation for this outage, which on the face of it demonstrates a significant failure on the part of the States of Guernsey to implement and maintain a robust digital architecture or adequate disaster recovery capabilities to maintain public services. The ongoing outage increases reputational as well as operational risk for the government which it will be hard to recover from.
These shortfalls need to be addressed urgently if the island wishes to compete with other jurisdictions as a secure and robust place to do business. It also seriously detracts from the huge benefits that could be obtained from digital delivery of public services, and to build a reputation as a premier digital jurisdiction.
The episode also raises the question as to how resilient government systems would be in a genuine security crisis.
