Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)
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319. To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine the amount of funding provided under the capital plan for the information technology infrastructure across his Department; the amount spent to date; the progress to date; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [19282/17]

Michael Creed (Cork North West, Fine Gael)
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The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine is heavily reliant on ICT Services to operate the large range of services for which it is responsible.  These services cover areas such EU and national scheme payments, animal welfare, food safety, environmental protection, trade and EU negotiations and the seafood industry. The Department has an excellent record in the delivery of IT systems and has some of the most advanced animal welfare and scheme payment systems in EU.  It is essential that the technology that underpins these services is kept up to date and the Department makes every effort to ensure that we achieve value for money with our expenditure.

The 2016 capital expenditure spend for Information Technology Infrastructure in 2016 was €1,434,615.43, and the 2017 capital expenditure budget is €2.9 million. The expenditure to date is €86,541.54; the vast majority of the capital projects are awaiting the finalisation of several large information technology infrastructure-related tenders.

The headline capital IT expenditure items for 2017 are:

- Upgrade of the ICT server estate

- Upgrade of workstations and other devices

- Disaster Recovery upgrade (e.g. software, network equipment, firewall and servers)

- Upgrade and additional Video Conferencing facilities

- New enterprise software licenses

- Increasing the virtualisation footprint in ICT infrastructure.