Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1428470
maltatoday | SUNDAY • 14 NOVEMBER 2021 15 COMMERCIAL accessed by government employees in their day-to-day work. The importance and relevance of online service is con- tinuously increasing, making this a very critical service. Kenneth, Audrey just said that the use of these services is on the rise. These services are becoming essential in people's daily lives and not only for the government and its employees. The public too is constantly accessing these systems now. How do you and your team work with others within MITA to ensure the delivery of such essential services? The experts within the Network Team, the Internet Team and the Systems and Databases Team are responsible for de- signing the platforms, implementing them, maintaining them and to contin- uously update and improve these ser- vices, so as to provide a better service to the government, and the general public. Our experts solve complex problems and are therefore continuously involved in research to find solutions to issues that arise. But there are also problems that will impact the service. In such cases, our priority would be to get the service up and running again as quickly as possi- ble, often bringing in other teams - net- works, internet and others – depending on the nature and scale of the problem. But we don't stop there. Once we have uploaded the service again, an inves- tigation is launched to identify what caused that problem in the first place and to make sure it does not repeat it- self. It is very important that we, as teams, work together since the problems can arise from various sources. If everyone were to work separately, we would in- advertently soon learn that the issue might be coming from areas covered by the network team, or our team or the internet team. As I said earlier, our ex- perts ensure that our platforms are con- stantly updated as it is imperative that these are always secure. As we update the platforms, we install security fixes as well as bug fixes, therefore avoiding certain incidents that the platforms could encounter. And finally, when installing these up- dates, we also include any new features that might have been released by the vendor to make sure that exploit the platform's full capabilities. As a team, we are providing a service that is very technical in nature but we work hard with other teams to be able to deliver the service to the govern- ment successfully. It is not all technical. There is the legal element, the financial element as well as management which ensures that each project is in line with MITA's strategy. Audrey what challenges does your department face? I think one of the major challenges we face is that when you have a service, such as the internet service, the infra- structure behind it is meant to serve for many years. When you reach a point that necessitates a migration – refresh- ing the technology behind that service to take it to the next level - we would need to take a snapshot of how many users utilise the service and how much bandwidth is being used, for example. We would therefore need to work a lot with other teams that make use of the network's affected service. We start preparing for these migra- tions months in advance and we deploy the infrastructure before getting to the migration point. For us, success is when users utilising that service, such as the internet, do not even realise we have switched from one infrastructure to an- other. That is a successful migration. What about your team Elaine? What challenges do you face? Without a doubt, bandwidth is a chal- lenge we face every day. Most of the services that are being used today are cloud-based and a system that is on the internet has to make use of the internet infrastructure. Secondly, nowadays there more devic- es – other than computers and laptops – that connect to a network, such as IOT devices, CCTV cameras, IP phones and others. All this is increasing the dependence on the network and on the bandwidth. As an example, when the pandem- ic broke out, people shifted to work- ing from home. So that part of the infrastructure increased, the traffic in- creased and the amount of data being transmitted increased. Upgrades were needed and it was a big challenge. We had to be fast so as not hinder the work of the government. We ended up en- larging the infrastructure eight times to keep up with the new demand.