Development Towards a Cloud-Based Failover Architecture to Support Zambia Revenue Authority’s Domestic Tax Systems

The research abstract explores the necessity of transitioning Zambia's domestic tax systems to a cloud-based failover architecture. Identifying existing challenges such as manual disaster recovery, system failures requiring human intervention, and inadequate logging, causing extended downtimes, data loss, and reduced taxpayer confidence. The study aims to introduce a hybrid cloud web application architecture, focusing on eradicating application downtime and ensuring taxpayer data security. Cloud-based standby failover architectures promise high uptime and data integrity, with servers hosted online to ensure 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 the impact on tax application uptime and recovery metrics. The significance lies in enhancing system resilience, scalability, cost-efficiency, security, and accessibility, providing benefits like continuity, cost savings, security enhancements, and technological advancements. The methodology involved expert consultations and 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 and tests were conducted, requiring scaling to mirror the ZRA production environment. Tasks including data encryption and security checks on application databases were implemented. Results 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.