1880 (2026). Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall to the Minister of Health

1880 (2026). Hon Dr Ayesha Verrall to the Minister of Health: What assessment, if any, has been made of the risk of single points of failure within exterior commercial datacentres relied on by hospitals, including the adequacy of backup systems and redundancy?

Hon Simeon Brown: I am advised that Health New Zealand has a comprehensive risk management framework, which is the basis for reviewing and managing risks, mitigations and treatments including resilience, redundancy and disaster recovery. Critical services relied on by hospitals are designed to be resilient, regardless of where they are hosted. I am further advised that the root cause of failures, of both individual hardware components as well as failover and disaster recovery systems, are part of the analysis and post incident reviews. I am also advised that while Health NZ has not done a specific assessment on the risk of single points of failure within external commercial datacentres, the data centres they use are all-of-government accredited data centres.