Safe Harbor For Data

The Coast Guard wants to make sure its 45,000 service members will have easy, round-the-clock access to their personnel data, so it's turning over the management of human-resources data to application service provider Corio Inc. "We didn't have good disaster recovery, and we didn't have the capability to do this ourselves," says David Swatloski, chief of the Coast Guard's office for IT and HR.

Under the $6.1 million, five-year contract, the Coast Guard will move its HR data to a Web-based PeopleSoft system. A live version of the application and data, to roll out in March, will run in one data center, while a backup version resides in a separate facility.

The move comes as the Coast Guard prepares for integration into the Department of Homeland Security, a 170,000-employee amalgam of 22 federal departments. The Web-based implementation should make it easier for other homeland-security agencies to access Coast Guard HR data, Swatloski says. "You don't have the desktop or bandwidth requirements that some other systems might require."