Dear Colleagues:
I'd like to provide you with an update you on the status of our system's extreme instability over the last week and the plans and measures being put in place to solve the issue in the immediate and long term. We understand your frustration and the difficulties with the recent outages are causing, and want to reassure you that our team has been working diligently to identify the cause of the outages and to implement solutions to prevent them from occurring in the future.
The IT team has conducted a thorough investigation into the possible causes of the outages, including reviewing system logs and analyzing performance metrics, while consulting with external experts. While these efforts are still ongoing, an inconspicuous technical issue has been preliminarily identified as a probable cause. In balancing the need for cybersecurity and accessibility, a technical conflict seemed to have emerged between our cyber virus-detection application and the servers' operating system. This conflict is causing the system to shut down.
We are putting in place the following measures:
A: Based on recommendations from a Microsoft technician, we have temporarily removed said third-party virus detection application from the servers and are monitoring system stability. With this action, the system is currently stabilized and the website and ANR web portal are now up and working.
B: We are building a new server on the latest operating system. To ensure that the new server and any application that resides there will be compatible, this process will be performed manually without importing settings from the old servers with legacy stability issue.
Additionally, working with the Program Support Unit, the IT team has also prioritized assisting PSU with moving their event registration web pages to the cloud-based Aventri system so that they can remain up and functioning for the many events that are coming up soon, including the very important ANR Statewide Conference, regardless of ANR's own web services performance status.
We understand that system stability is critical to our operations, and we assure you that we are doing everything possible to resolve the issue. Thank you for your patience and continued support as we work through these issues.
Regards,
Tu Tran
Associate Vice President for Business Operations