A confidential $1.34 million city council computer deal has surfaced in the committee records months after the event.

Council agreed on October 7 last year to spend the unbudgeted amount, but it remained in confidential until appearing in Finance and Risk Committee records today.

Tauranga City Council last year approved spending $1.3million on upgrading computer systems.

The decision was made days before local body elections that ousted seven councillors from office.

The unbudgeted $1.34 million computer spend up was agreed to in confidence by the city council, says a statement released today.

The report remained in confidential because of the sensitive information about council and inter-council networks and the fact that commercial negotiations were required to buy the hardware to address the issues.

The decision followed the arrival of the new management team at council, who highlighted a number of areas of investment to, 'drive improvements and reduce risks for the organisation across the council and inter-council network.”

Additional budgets were sought to increase the council's backup capacity to cope with the growing amount of information held on council systems, to enhance the inter-council network security to bring this in line with current good practice, and work to upgrade Council systems to Windows 7, as the previous system Windows XP, was about to be unsupported by the provider.

Microsoft's support for Windows XP ended in April 2014. Updates to Windows XP would not be released to fix new security issues.

The councillors recognised that project planning for the upgrade needed urgent attention, and that it had to be completed before April 2014, as it was.

Council identified the need to address these areas to ensure Council data is managed well, kept secure and provides a platform to enable further business improvements, which will move more services online, says communications manager Frank Begley.

The development of a digital strategy is now to be considered as part of the ten year plan and comes in response to the growing demands of customers for 24/7 and increased mobile pathways to access Council services.

Councillors considered a report on it on October 7, along with a peer reviewed report on costings to ensure the need for investment was both real and the amount appropriate.

Council approved spending up to $1.35m.

In addition to the trend for storing additional digital information across the council, there have also been two specific projects in the last two years that created significant demand for increased information storage and data protection.

One was the STAR project, which enabled digitisation of all historic Council documents and now puts the Council in a strong position for moving more services online.

And the implementation of the replacement document management system from Dataworks to Objective.

A council ICT strategic review completed in August 2013 also identified that the city council needed to further invest in network and systems to create a good practice approach to security, and to ensure the back-information system was sufficiently sized to protect its data.

Unless addressed, TCC's ability to meet compliance for information retention was at risk, says Frank.

At that time Council was planning to implement a replacement document management system Objective, which could not be protected unless new investment was approved for information protection. The new document management system was successfully installed in early December 2013.

Information council protects includes regulatory information such as building consents, land information, rates, dog licences; in short information the Council requires to meet its statutory obligations such as Public Records Act 2005.