Oldham Council is to install new computer upgrades after announcing it receives more than 10,000 cyber attacks per day.
Members of Oldham Council’s cabinet said they would like to spend £682,000 on a “modern data protection service”.
In a meeting of the cabinet, councillor Abdul Jabbar said they needed “cutting-edge technology” to make sure the council data is safe after announcing there are 10,000 attacks on the system on a daily basis.
He added that more than 50 councils, including Manchester City Council, and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority were already working with the intended Rubrik platform.
Out of date system
He said: “We’ve been using for a number of years the Commvault system hardware and software which has served us really well but given that we’ve got a modern IT landscape and we need to have the cutting edge equipment to make sure our data is protected and if we need to restore it then what we’re suggesting is that we need a new system. In simple terms, we’ve got a system that is now out of date.”
He went on to explain the current system cannot protect back up data against malicious damage and some services held in the cloud.
Money well spent
Councillor Elaine Taylor added: “Given some of the cyber attacks we’ve seen recently this is quite timely. It would be money well spent. It’s a scary prospect to think all of our systems could go down and that all of that data would be out in the public domain.”
Buying the new system is “critical for both disaster recovery scenarios” and to protect against accidental deletion and corruption, officers said.
The new purchase follows malware attached on the University of Manchester, which had data copied after some systems were accessed by an unauthorised party.
