Development towards a cloud-based failover architecture to support Zambia Revenue Authority’s domestic tax systems.
Date
2024
Authors
Chalwe, David
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The University of Zambia
Abstract
The Zambia Revenue Authority is Zambia’s tax collection agency. It runs multiple web-based applications to support its revenue collection mandate. Unfortunately, as is currently structured, most of these applications are entirely supported by localized physical resources and heavily rely on manual intervention from system administrators to maintain system uptime. The research provides a comprehensive overview of transitioning Zambia Revenue Authority’s domestic tax systems to a cloud-based failover architecture. It addresses existing challenges such as manual disaster recovery, human intervention-dependent system failures recovery, and inadequate logging, which lead to prolonged downtimes, data loss, and diminished taxpayer confidence. The study aims to introduce a hybrid cloud web application architecture, emphasizing the elimination of application downtime and ensuring the security of taxpayer data. Cloud-based warm standby failover architectures offer high uptime and data integrity, with servers hosted online to maintain uninterrupted business operations. The research objectives include creating a warm backup server on Amazon Web Services (AWS) private cloud servers, implementing data encryption policies, and evaluating their impact on tax application uptime and recovery metrics. The significance of this research lies in enhancing system resilience, scalability, cost-efficiency, security, and accessibility, providing benefits such as continuity, cost savings, security enhancements, and technological advancements. The methodology involved development of a failover testing prototype, study of existing case studies, quantitative and qualitative analysis through surveys and interviews with experts, historical analysis to identify system inefficiencies, determine efficient failover architecture, and gather relevant literature for a secure hybrid cloud approach. The prototype test environment was successfully set up, with tests conducted requiring scaling to mirror the ZRA production environment. Additionally, tasks including data encryption and security checks on application databases were implemented. The prototype results indicated a substantial reduction over recovery time of system after failure and reduced need for manual intervention. These results coupled with the theoretical and analytical aspects of the methodology helped support the hypothesis that the advantages of a cloud-based failover system outweigh potential challenges like data security, sovereignty concerns, cost management, integration complexity, legal compliance, and cybersecurity threats.
Key Words/Phrases: 1. Cloud-based failover architecture 2. Taxation systems 3. Data security and privacy 4. Hybrid cloud architecture 5. Resilience and continuity
Description
Thesis of Masters in Computer Science.