Sita Claps Back At Home Affairs Over 'divorce'
TechCentral reported last week that home affairs had formally applied for a separation from Sita, citing the government agency's lacklustre performance and the alleged inflated cost of services as a key risk to its IT modernisation efforts.
According to home affairs' annual performance plan for the 2025/2026 financial year, published last week, its dependency on Sita has led to frequent outages and system downtime, delays in the procurement of IT services, and cost overruns that have impacted its already constrained budget.
In a statement on Tuesday, Sita rebutted this by saying it has submitted multiple proposals to home affairs since 2021 aimed at modernising its IT environment. These, it said, are yet to be implemented, yet home affairs continues to blame Sita for its IT issues.
- A five-year, R400-million investment to redesign Sita's core network and replace outdated infrastructure with a software-defined network-ready system across 24 switching centres
- The addition of redundant core links, procured in 2022 and approved by national treasury, which improved core availability to 99.35 according to Sita
- The migration of customer virtual private networks to new infrastructure and the installation of remote environment monitoring systems to prevent downtime at switching centres and
- Layer-2 services awarded to an industry partner, culminating in the complete migration of Sita's core network to a resilient 10Gbit/s architecture by October 2024.
Home affairs also accused Sita of having a poor cybersecurity posture, warning that the risks posed at certain points in its network architecture, such as in the border management system, ultimately compromise national security.
Sita responded by saying it is working all the time on its cybersecurity framework by improving its continuous control procedures and strengthening the capabilities of its security operations centre. Any systemic security gaps that have been identified are being addressed through ongoing assessments and system upgrades, said Tlali.