What happens to the state's data in a disaster?
Oklahoma has launched a $ 110 million backup data center, storing much of the state's electronic information south of the Red River in Texas.
The secondary data center in Garland, Texas, will be used if the primary center in Oklahoma City ever goes offline.
The center, known as TX1, is a private facility operated by Dell and NTT. If a natural disaster or crippling cyber attack takes down the primary center, which is housed in a building near the Oklahoma State Capitol, TX1 is expected to be operational within hours.
Officials picked Texas because it's far away enough to avoid the same disaster but close enough to visit quickly.
“We have the ability to quickly flip a switch and come up live,” said Steven Harpe, director of the Office of Management and Enterprise Services, the state agency that oversees Oklahoma's information services and cybersecurity. “It'll take us a few hours to get everything vetted out and online, where previously it would have taken a month.”
The backup at TX1 holds 2.66 petabytes of storage. That's 2.6 million gigabytes.
“That's thousands of systems. The networks had to be done completely from scratch,” Harpe said. “Now we can look people in the eyes and say that if something happens to this building, knock on wood, that we can provide those services for the (Department of Human Services), for the Tax Commission, and for others.”
Before TX1 came online, OMES didn't have such a robust backup to ensure the continuity of state government. The project was completed within four months and used $ 110 million in federal CARES Act pandemic relief funding.
That spending and other projects were under the microscope Thursday in a report by the Legislative Office of Fiscal Transparency, which criticized Gov. Kevin Stitt's handling of CARES funds.
The report also said the Stitt administration used more CARES Act funds for state agency needs,
including information technology, software and tech modernization, than projects for public health, safety or economic stabilization.
In remarks earlier in the week, Harpe told reporters that with all the horrible things to come out of the COVID- 19 pandemic, the TX1 data
backup project was something positive.
"This is one that's historic for the state. We've never had this capability," Harpe said.