ANALYSIS: The ABS learnt from the mistakes of the 2016 census shutdown, running a text-book 2021 survey.
The data from the $565 million 2021 census is still being processed, but the transformation of the paper-based community survey into a fully digital service hasFor the ABS, it represents a major turnaround from when the first iteration of the electronic census in 2016 wasafter authorities suspected the site had been infiltrated.
The 2016 census was in many ways a failure of governance. The shutdown was ordered after attempts to ring-fence IBM’s locally based servers from an offshore denial-of-service attack faltered, forcing officials to make the prudent, but catastrophic, decision to temporarily shut down the online portal.
Cybersecurity has come a long way in five years, and a strict security and privacy-by-design approach was taken to every level of the census program. Security experts were involved in all major technology decisions, and there were more than 20 big penetration-testing exercises and a simulation of one of the largest DDoS attacks ever undertaken in Australia. The entire code base was reviewed four times.
Field staff were given a mobile app, MyWork, developed by Sydney-based Tigerspike, to manage workloads and tasks. The app worked both off and online, allowing field officers full functionality when working in remote locations with little or no connectivity.
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