The Chief Information Officer in the Governor’s Office, Ray Tulafono, reported to the Senate Select Investigative Committee last Friday that the government is now using the services of a company in Hawaii to make payments for the cloud that is storing data that was collected by DataHouse Inc.
DataHouse operated the TalofaPass portal where travelers to American Samoa registered during the COVID pandemic.
The cloud server, Amazon Web Service, only accepts payments via credit card; and ASG does not have a credit card.
Tulafono said the Hawaii company, Carahsoft, will facilitate payment to Amazon Web Service and ASG will continue to use AWS for storage of the data that was collected by DataHouse.
He said they are now working with Carahsoft to come up with an agreement with AWS to continue using their service for storage of the data. Once that has been completed, then the data will be completely transferred to the government. This then allows the Department of Health to have access to the data.
The Chief Information officer said they will review later if there’s a need to retain a different server or continue using AWS for data storage in the cloud.
Tulafono explained that the ASG office of Information Technology has funds to pay for the services of the Hawaii company, Carahsoft, that’s facilitating credit card payment for AWS. The company will then bill ASG.
The Chairman of the Senate Select Investigative Committee, Senator Togiola Tulafono, who did not attend the earlier hearing with the Chief Information Officer, said it was important for the senators understanding to hear this explanation about where things stand as far as migrating the data collected by DataHouse to the government.
After ASG’s contract with DataHouse ended on August 30, the SSIC is looking into why the data that the company collected under TalofaPass has not been transferred to the government and why travelers have to register again via a website by the Department of Health.
