Statistics office moves its data systems across the street

Iceland’s Statistics Office is moving its operations about 100 metres to new premises across Borgartún today, mbl.is reports. The institution has been based at Borgartún 21a for 23 years and is relocating to Borgartún 26, where the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Food previously had offices.

The move will temporarily take the Statistics Office website offline. The disruption is expected to last through part of the day and possibly into the weekend.

Ólafur Arnar Þórðarson, the office’s communications director, said the outage was linked to the institution’s internal systems and large databases, including traceable data used to produce official statistics.

The Statistics Office keeps its core data on its own premises rather than in cloud storage, while backups are held at external data centres. Published statistical reports and figures are stored in the cloud.

The move also involves upgrading equipment and computer servers. The data is being transferred electronically to new machines, and the temporary service disruption is needed to start the new systems after the old ones are shut down.

Ólafur said the process was not particularly complicated and that the office expected only limited disruption.