Government servers to be relocated by October

By October government servers damaged by a water leak in April will be relocated to premises operated by the Cyprus Telecommunications Authority (CyTA), the deputy minister of research said on Tuesday.

“We’re on track,” Philippos Hadjizacharias told media.

Hadjizacharias recalled that the government’s IT centre – hosted in the basement of the finance ministry – had sustained some damage due to the water leak.

He said that already the IT companies with which the state collaborates have provided some temporary routers and servers, while the government has ordered new gear to replace the servers that suffered irreparable damage.

“We have timetables on when the problematic servers will arrive, and as soon as they do, they will be moved to the new premises.”

According to the deputy minister, one of the companies has assured the government that “in two weeks we will have the new system that we need to bring to replace the existing one, and we estimate that the whole project [relocation of the IT centre] will be completed within October.”

He added: “We’re on a good path, we’re in constant contact with the companies supplying us as well as with CyTA, which will configure the space that’s been prepared, and once we have everything they will be relocated to the premises which CyTA has indicated.”

On April 11, government services went offline for much of the day following a flooding incident overnight in the room they are hosted in.

The government ordered an investigation, with the deputy ministry for research apologising to the public for any inconvenience after all the websites of ministries and governmental departments went down.

It transpired that back in the early 2000s the government’s IT department – then part of the finance ministry – had been located in the basement of the finance ministry building in Nicosia.

The IT department later came under the junior ministry of research, innovation and digital policy when the latter was established in March 2020.

In November 2022, under a cabinet decision by the administration of Nicos Anastasiades, the IT department was to be relocated from the finance ministry building – but implementation was delayed.

After the April incident, it also emerged that a report compiled by a tech company four years earlier had warned the government of the risk of water leaks in the finance ministry’s basement.