Report 2016-129 Recommendation 11 Responses

Report 2016-129: K-12 High Speed Network: Improved Budgeting, Greater Transparency, and Increased Oversight Are Needed to Ensure That the Network Is Providing Reliable Services at the Lowest Cost to the State (Release Date: May 2017)

Recommendation #11 To: Imperial County Office of Education

To better support future reporting efforts for the K12HSN program, ICOE should amend its contract with CENIC to require CENIC to report on specific network performance measures, including the frequency, cause, location, and duration of network outages or interruptions.

1-Year Agency Response

ICOE agrees with the recommendation that it monitor network performance. ICOE is translating existing outage emails from the CENIC Network Operations Center into an Incident Report in a manual process. The Incident Report details each circuit outage and whether the outage resulted in a "hard down" or not. In the vast majority of cases, the load balancing circuit is able to keep the site from being out of production. This is especially important when the circuit failure turns out to be hard to identify or difficult to repair. ICOE provides the Incident Report to California Department of Education monthly, typically by the 10th of the month following.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 1-Year Status: Fully Implemented

As we discuss in our assessment of ICOE's six-month response to this recommendation, ICOE was at that time still determining whether it would provide the greatest benefit to the K12HSN program to add the recommended monitoring activities to its contract with CENIC, or to take primary responsibility itself for that monitoring. In addition to providing updated data regarding network interruptions, ICOE also confirmed in its one-year response that it has taken primary responsibility for monitoring connectivity using supporting data provided by CENIC.

6-Month Agency Response

ICOE agrees with the recommendation that it monitor outages on the network and track service credits when they are earned to ensure they are recovered from the provider. Currently ICOE is translating existing outage reports from the CENIC Network Operations Center into an Incident Report in a manual process. The Incident Report details each circuit outage and whether the outage resulted in a "hard down" or not. In the vast majority of cases, the load balancing circuit is able to keep the site from being out of production. This is especially important when the circuit failure turns out to be hard to identify or difficult to repair. CENIC and ICOE are working collaboratively to create an automated system that will translate the email notices into the database currently being maintained manually. Until such time as an (affordable) automated system is identified, ICOE will continue with the manual monthly reports.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 6-Month Status: Partially Implemented

ICOE provided us with documentation regarding the monitoring efforts it is currently undertaking using data provided by CENIC. ICOE plans to continue these efforts until it reaches agreement with CENIC about the most efficient and effective means of automating the process on a permanent basis, including determining the most effective use of that information with respect to holding Internet service providers accountable. At this time, it is not clear whether this will be accomplished through an amendment to ICOE's contract with CENIC. We will evaluate the recommendation's status again when those decisions have been made.

60-Day Agency Response

On June 8, 2017 ICOE and CENIC met to discuss new processes that will assist in ICOE's ability to report on network performance. Draft language for a contract amendment with CENIC is being developed and will be shared with CENIC for discussion by July 27, 2017.

In addition, ICOE's independent monitoring system is being evaluated for an approach to automate delivery of information from the system into a report format that provides most of the information being requested from Education. The "reason for outage" is a data element that is only available from CENIC. Currently using manual steps, the location, duration and frequency are available to ICOE from its own system and the program is working to determine the best approach to extracting this data from the monitoring system into outage reports.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 60-Day Status: Pending

All Recommendations in 2016-129

Agency responses received are posted verbatim.