The South African Department of Labour has taken its digital services offline while it relocates its data center.

All systems were shut down at 16:00 on February 20th, and will not be restored until February 25th.

Relocation, relocation, relocation

The Department of Labour's current data center is housed in the Unemployment Insurance Fund building in South Africa's capital city, Pretoria. The old building is going to undergo major renovations, and all employees will be temporarily relocated.

Over the weekend, the department will be moving its infrastructure 30km south, to the municipality of Midrand.

The Department of Labour has not revealed the target data center. There are several colocation facilities listed in the Midrand area; some of them belong to one of the largest colocation providers in South Africa, Business Connexion (BCX).

BCX is an ICT group with operations in Africa, Europe and the Middle East. The company owns two Tier IV facilities in Midrand, as well as five more across Africa. BCX also manages 52 data centers on behalf of its clients.

Midrand is a hub for data centers in South Africa, and both IBM and Vodacom have their facilities in the area.

The Department said that it hopes that the relocation of the data center will help improve efficiency through new infrastructure, faster connectivity, improved uptime, reliability and stability of systems.

Other benefits include enhanced physical security, compliance and additional redundancies and backup power.

“The Department has signed a contract with the State Information Technology Agency (SITA) to house the new data center in a state of the art facility in Midrand,” the agency sai in a statement.

“The ICT Unit has already commenced with refreshing the outdated server and storage infrastructure, with further hardware refresh planned for after the relocation.”