Two years after a fire at a Calgary data centre disrupted services at the province’s hospitals, registries and state-owned bank for days, Alberta’s financial watchdog says the government is still not ready should another information technology disaster strike.

While some weaknesses in previous business recovery plans were identified and fixed in the wake of the 2012 blaze at the Shaw Court building, auditor general Merwan Saher said Tuesday that Alberta Health Services, Service Alberta and ATB Financial have not fully tested whether they can restore essential applications within 24 hours.

“The sudden absence of some programs and services increased the risk to the safety and well-being of Albertans,” Saher said.

“If a similar incident occurred today, the government would still be unable to say it knows what the most critical government-wide IT applications are, or that it has well-designed and tested plans and the needed resources to recover them with targeted times.”

After the July 11, 2012, explosion at the downtown building where government servers were at an IBM data centre, the province’s health authority was unable to access electronic records that were necessary to order tests, chart conditions and order medications for patients.

Since the disaster, Saher said AHS has identified 19 critical applications and developed plans so they can be restored promptly after an outage.

But the authority has yet to purchase the necessary computer infrastructure and test its recovery capability.

“AHS would currently be unable to recover its critical IT applications within its own targeted recovery times,” Saher said.

“We will follow up ... in one year to ensure it has met its disaster recovery preparedness deadlines.”

While they work to improve their IT infrastructure, AHS officials say if a failure were to occur today the authority would revert to paper-based methods to ensure there are no gaps in patient care.

“We do know that we can never guarantee, no matter what backup systems we have in place, that ... outages will not occur,” the authority said in a prepared statement.

“Manual downtime procedures will continue to be our fail-safe process because they enable us to manage ... no matter what the scenario.”

ATB Financial has relocated its primary servers elsewhere since the fire disabled its online banking, electronic fund transfers and ability to accept some loan applications for up to three days.

But the government-owned bank told Saher it could be another 12 months before it can complete a full IT disaster recovery test.

Service Alberta was unable to process driver’s licence renewals, land titles transfers and vital statistic documents for up to a week after the disaster.

The department has since identified 120 critical applications it needs to restore within one day and another 166 programs it needs to have back up running within three days.

While tests of some core infrastructure have shown services can be resumed in less than 24 hours, the auditor general says the government as a whole has still not dealt with the “biggest risk.”

“There is no one group or entity within government with the authority to ensure that critical IT applications ... Albertans rely on can be recovered within targeted times during or after a disaster,” Saher said.

Officials with Service Alberta say the province has spent an estimated $8 million since the disaster on new infrastructure to ensure essential computer functions at its two major data centres are properly backed up.