NMI govt websites are back

Starting last July 10, some CNMI government websites became inaccessible, including that of the Legislature’s, but many of them have already started coming back online.

According to Ron Smith, president of Angil Design, Inc. that hosts many of the sites, these websites are now online and fully functional at this time. They are also finalizing the Legislative Bureau site to be back today, and are waiting on the transition for the Zoning Board’s website. It is anticipated that all affected sites will be restored to full functionality on or around July 29.

Smith explained that an incident at their data center in Dallas, Texas, resulted in the database and backup servers being taken offline on July 10, where it was determined that data on these servers were not compromised (all sensitive data is encrypted to industry standards), but were no longer accessible.

“Angil Design took immediate steps to contract with a different data center and begin the process of moving over 100 sites. Sites with .mp domains, however, take longer to move, as doing so requires a manual process. We are still waiting for this process to be completed for some sites,” he said.

Smith apologized for the inconvenience that this incident has caused and assured everyone that they are taking aggressive steps to mitigate this type of issue in the future. “Moving forward, we have built new servers here on Saipan that will synchronize with the data center on an hourly basis and have daily offline backups. This will allow rapid redeployment of site data in the case of an outage or loss of data at a given data center,” he said.

Lt. Gov. Arnold I. Palacios earlier directed press secretary Kevin Bautista to make sure that all government agencies stay on top of their websites, to keep the community informed, especially with social distancing protocols in place due to the pandemic.

This came after complaints from the community, and even from within the agencies, of not being able to access the websites to request for permits and submit applications online, check for jobs, or file complaints and report issues, for the past week, following being down

Among the agencies affected were the CNMI Department of Labor, Bureau of Environmental and Coastal Quality, Scholarship Office, CNMI Legislature, and the CNMI Zoning Board.

Bautista now says that plans are in the works to make the gov.mp website a central hub for other departments and agencies’ websites to link with, to make access easier for the community.

“I’ve spoken to members of our of the governor’s and the lieutenant governor’s Cabinet, and the positive thing is that we’re all readily on board on increasing our technological capacity, and to ensure that servers on each website are maintained and that information is regularly updated,” Bautista added.