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What assessment, if any, has been made of the risk of single points of failure within exterior commercial datacentres relied on by hospitals, including the adequacy of backup systems and redundancy?

Answered Question 1880 (2026)
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Asked by

Ayesha Verrall

List MP · Labour Party

Question

  • What assessment, if any, has been made of the risk of single points of failure within exterior commercial datacentres relied on by hospitals, including the adequacy of backup systems and redundancy?

Answered by

Hon Simeon Brown

Member for Pakuranga · National Party · Minister of Health

Answer

I am advised that Health New Zealand has a comprehensive risk management framework, which is the basis for reviewing and managing risks, mitigations and treatments including resilience, redundancy and disaster recovery. Critical services relied on by hospitals are designed to be resilient, regardless of where they are hosted. I am further advised that the root cause of failures, of both individual hardware components as well as failover and disaster recovery systems, are part of the analysis and post incident reviews. I am also advised that while Health NZ has not done a specific assessment on the risk of single points of failure within external commercial datacentres, the data centres they use are all-of-government accredited data centres.