DATA MIRRORING FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENT UNITS

DATA MIRRORING FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENT UNITS During my term as Director General of the National Computer Center (NCC), our agency became one of the biggest providers of transactional software applications to the Local Government Units (LGUs), simply because we were giving away the software for free. That was the good news, but the bad news is that many of the LGUs installed the software applications on stand-alone personal computers (PCs), and not on data servers. As a result, many of the PCs crashed, and the stored data was lost. As a matter of fact, some LGUs blamed me when their systems crashed, even if it was clearly their fault. Supposedly, those LGUs should have stored their data in high-capacity servers, and not in small capacity stand-alone PCs. Of course, the better alternative even at that time was to build local data centers in their own premises, but most of the LGUs could not afford to build data centers even at that time. As far as I know, many LGUs are only using PCs that are configured to function as servers, but of course these are not as good as the real thing. In my opinion, the most practical way for all cities and municipalities their data is for all of them to consolidate their data into one centralized data center that would be hosted or managed by the provincial governments. Needless to say, that should also include the data of all the barangays under the provinces. At that level of coordination, it would now be affordable for all provinces to operate their own data centers. In reality, it is very difficult for barangays, municipalities and cities to operate their own data centers. That is so because aside from not having the sufficient budgets to spend for these data centers, they also find it difficult to recruit the right technical staff to run these data centers. Even if they are able to recruit them, it still difficult to keep them employed, because their salaries are very high, at times even higher than the salaries of the local officials. My best recommendation however is for all barangays, municipalities and cities to host their data in the cloud, instead of hosting it in their own data centers. On its own, all provinces could their data in the cloud, even without including the data of the barangays, municipalities and cities. For good measure, they should also have data recovery and data mirroring sites in the cloud. That would be the best combination. IKE SENERES/08-28-2024