By DALCY LULUA
PNG Power Limited (PPL) is accelerating the transition of its Easipay system to a Papua New Guinea-based data centre after a recent outage exposed risks linked to offshore hosting.
Chief Executive Officer Paul Bayly said the system has been stabilised, but the disruption highlighted deeper concerns.
“While we have stabilised the system, this outage has highlighted a deeper issue-the risks associated with offshore hosting of critical national infrastructure,” he said.
Bayly confirmed that PPL is now moving its system infrastructure back onshore.
“There’s a number of things we’re doing. We’re transitioning the server from our service to a PNG data centre here in this country,” he said.
“I’m not at liberty today to say the name, but they’ve been working with us very closely over a period of time.”
He said the Easipay system had been hosted offshore for many years.
“It’s been a significant period-10 to 15 years, possibly longer- that Easipay has been hosted offshore since it was introduced,” Bayly said.
The move to local hosting is expected to improve reliability, strengthen data security, and ensure sensitive customer information remains within the country.
“This transition is essential. It strengthens reliability, improves responsiveness, enhances data security, and ensures that sensitive customer information remains within Papua New Guinea,” he said.
The transition had already been planned, with work starting about three months ago, but was accelerated after the outage.
“It’s not something we hadn’t recognised. It was already in train- we’ve just had to accelerate it as fast as possible,” Bayly said.
Kumul Consolidated Holdings has invested K1.4 million to support the rollout of PPL’s Oracle ERP system and recovery efforts.
Bayly said the migration process is complex and involves setting up and testing a parallel system before going live.
“We’re allowing about two weeks. First you set up a parallel system, test it rigorously, and only when everything is confirmed do you load the data,” he said.
He added that some data has already been transferred to the local partner in preparation for the switch.
“We won’t do that until the system is fully tested to ensure we don’t have a glitch,” he said.
PPL is also strengthening its database systems and improving business continuity and disaster recovery measures to prevent future disruptions.
“These reforms will ensure that the failures we experienced this week do not happen again,” Bayly said.