RBS seem to have had major technology issues

[William Muriithi]

On 25 June 2012 09:44, Ian Garmaise <ian.g-m+eCFz0Wf2kS+FvcfC7Uqw at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> From the Guardian - confessions of an IT salesman
>
> http://bit.ly/Mv3kgD
>
>
Actually that looks like a better story behind what happened to RBC.
It look like they were able to identify and roll back RC petty
quickly, but they seem to have know one local with the no how to bring
the rest of the systems back to sanity.  Basically they seem to have
thinned their tech group too much that nobody seem to know the system
very well.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18577109

One RBS banker put it like this: "it was the management of the
after-effects of the software failure that caused us the real
difficulties, rather than the software failure itself".

As I understand it, one reason why RBS has not given much detailed
information about why its services have been so badly disrupted is
that so much of the operational responsibility for IT is outsourced -
so there is a sensitive issue of where to attribute blame.


William
> On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 9:39 AM, Dave Cramer <davec-zxk95TxsVYDyHADnj0MGvQC/G2K4zDHf at public.gmane.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> Well high availability as they sell it is a myth. It is extremely
>> difficult to test all the possible scenarios.
>>
>> It's not surprising that the odd bank goes down every once in a while.
>>
>> Dave Cramer
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 9:04 AM, Robert Brockway
>> <robert-5LEc/6Zm6xCUd8a0hrldnti2O/JbrIOy at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> > On Mon, 25 Jun 2012, William Muriithi wrote:
>> >
>> >> Wonder if any other bank have had such an extensive outage, apparently
>> >
>> >
>> > Other banks have certainly had serious outages in recent years.  One of
>> > the
>> > Big Five banks (RBC?) had a serious outage a few years ago which left
>> > people
>> > briefly unpaid.  Similarly, a couple of Australia's "Big Four" banks
>> > have
>> > had brief outages in recent months (IIRC).
>> >
>> > Banks used to be bastions of highly available redundant systems.  I
>> > wonder
>> > if times are changing.  If a bank is too big to be allowed to fail then
>> > perhaps it is also too big to be allowed to have an outage :)
>> >
>> > Cheers,
>> >
>> > Rob
>> >
>> > --
>> > Email: robert-5LEc/6Zm6xCUd8a0hrldnti2O/JbrIOy at public.gmane.org         Linux counter ID #16440
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>> > Web: http://www.practicalsysadmin.com
>> > Director, Software in the Public Interest (http://spi-inc.org/)
>> > Free & Open Source: The revolution that quietly changed the world
>> > "One ought not to believe anything, save that which can be proven by
>> > nature
>> > and the force of reason" -- Frederick II (26 December 1194 – 13 December
>> > 1250)
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