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NARA OIG Management Letter on Network Outage

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National Archives Office of Inspector General Management Letter No. 12-01, Network Outage

  • “On September 13,2011 NARA experienced an internet outage from a cut fiber-optic cable lasting approximately 32 hours and significantly affecting NARA’s operations. During that time, NARA staff were not able to access home and shared drives, email, the Internet, and numerous critical applications needed to perform their jobs. In addition, NARA’s customers were not able to access agency services because the outage affected NARA’s external websites as well. This Management Letter brings two separate issues to your attention discovered as a result of this outage; NARA has no failover Internet connection, and NARA’s continuity of operations (COOP) site may not be able to independently operate if there is an incident at All. NARA does not have a failover Internet connection to restore Internet and other services within a timely manner. According to the Executive for Business Support Services, when NARA implemented the Trusted Internet Connection (TIC) the Internet was no longer provided by a separate telecommunications circuit into one or more of our facilities. Instead it is provided through the MPLS wide area network (WAN) which is provided and managed by a service provider. According to the service provider, if NARA had diversity (i.e. dual access) in the network, the outage would have been prevented. The service provider reported they are looking into a diversity option.NARA officials overseeing the network architecture should have known the design of the network created a single point of failure, and taken action to address this risk before NARA’s mission and business capabilities were impacted.”
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