Seven days after the fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS), not even one-fifth of the government's administrative information systems have been restored. The government said it would focus on restoration work through the Chuseok holiday. It decided to execute restoration-related equipment and other expenses first and pay later. The government has begun work to allocate reserve funds for this.
Kim Min-jae, Vice Minister of the Ministry of the Interior and Safety and first deputy chief of the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters (CDSCH) on the NIRS fire, said at a briefing on the 2nd, "As of 12 p.m. today, 112 systems, including 21 first-grade systems, out of a total of 647 systems have been restored." The restoration rate is 17.31%.
He explained the slow restoration speed by saying, "Even among the systems in data centers 1–6 that were less affected by the fire, many were linked to and operated with the systems in the 7–8 data centers on the fifth floor where the fire occurred." He added, "We are increasing the restoration speed," and said, "We are replacing core infrastructure such as the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) and batteries at the Daejeon headquarters of the NIRS, and we are quickly purchasing and redeploying lost equipment such as servers and networks."
Vice Minister Kim said, "We have initiated procedures to use reserve funds for rapid restoration," and added, "Expenses related to deploying additional restoration personnel on site and purchasing new equipment will be executed first and paid later."
He also said they are taking steps to resume counseling for public inconvenience. Vice Minister Kim said, "With the People's Sinmungo halted, there is no counseling window for civil complaints at local governments," and added, "We are improving the functions of the local administration system so that needed civil complaint counseling, such as inquiries about the second consumer coupons, can take place, and we will resume online civil complaint counseling starting tomorrow."
He also said, "What we are most concerned about during the Chuseok holiday is public safety," adding, "Services like 'Safety Stepping Stone' and 'Disaster Safety Portal' are still not restored, but we will prioritize getting them back online."
Meanwhile, regarding the issue of data being completely lost within the "G-Drive," a data storage system for civil servants' work, Lee Yong-seok, director general for Digital Government Innovation at the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, said, "We think it was a deeply regrettable mistake not to have a backup system in place," adding, "When we build a new G-Drive, we will make sure such issues (lack of backup) do not occur."
G-Drive is an external cloud-based data storage system built so that central government civil servants can use work files from outside. Because the data stored there were not even backed up, they will be difficult to recover even if the system is restarted in the future. G-Drive was used by 125,000 central government civil servants. It contained 858 terabytes (TB) of materials, including various handover documents and inter-ministerial shared work files.