JLARC Summary of the Northrop Grumman Audit

JLARC Summary Agilysys Audit of the State Data Center Computer Outage On August 25, 2010, the Commonwealth’s data center in Chester (CESC) experienced a major outage that affected more than 26 State agencies. An audit of the outage and Northrop Grumman’s response to restore services was conducted by Agilysys, a provider of information technology services to Fortune 50, 500 and mid-tier customers. Agilysys was selected following a competitive process that involved the Governor’s Chief of Staff, the Secretary of Technology, the Commonwealth’s Chief Information Officer, Virginia Information Technologies Agency staff, the Director of the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC), and JLARC staff. Following completion of the audit, Northrop Grumman (NG) was given two opportunities to review the audit and submit factual corrections along with supporting documentation. NG was also allowed to submit a formal written response to include in the audit. As part of a long established process when working with consultants, JLARC staff worked with Agilysys to ensure the audit was factually correct and the findings were presented in a manner that could be understood by the general reader. The following are the primary findings from the Agilysys audit: The outage resulted from the failure of a key data storage system (DMX-3) and subsequent human error during its repair, but the primary cause of the failure remains unknown. Loss of ...