Bank of England to set new standards for when IT goes bad

The Bank of England is expecting financial institutions to be a bit less rubbish when IT goes wrong, it said today. The TSB fiasco that led to customers being unable to access their accounts, followed up by widespread fraud, has caused the BofE's Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) along with the Financial Conduct Authority …

[amanfromMars 1]

Quantum Progress, onefang ... Where and When This is That and Something Else Entirely Different Too

:-) When the Status Quo is Moribund and Disease Riddled, Radical Fundamental Revision and Super HyperVision Steps In to Flash Crash SCADA Operations and/or Provide Elite Exclusive Executive Systems Makeovers ..... Remote Anonymous Command and Virtual Autonomous Control Takovers?

[Stuart Halliday]

I went to help out my Boss's friends Accountancy business IT.

The company has 15+ staff and turns around £3+ million . OK. not huge. But then they're handling the accounts of thousands of local businesses.

I discovered that their 3 year old Backup system, which consisted of a DAT tape getting backed up every night at 2am, was coming up with "Do you want to overwrite this tap?" window and defaulting to no because no one was around!

The CEO was duly swapping the tape every morning for the last 3 years. But sadly didn't bother to actually check it was working. The set of tapes were full of 3 year old data....

I wish I had taken a picture of the CEO when he went very pale and then very red and sat down as the enormity of what mess his company and his reputation would have been in if his system had fallen over.

All I had to do was add /Y to the backup script line. Two ascii characters that would have costed him £3+ million?

You have to laugh at folks.....

[Alan Brown]

"I discovered that their 3 year old Backup system, which consisted of a DAT tape getting backed up every night at 2am"

In the 21st century, what kind of sane person backs up to 4mm tape? Even if it _appears_ to have backed up OK, there's no guarantee that you can read it a year later, or even tomorrow (no read after write and the substrate sometimes goes wonky)

There's far more wrong with this than the CEO's error and your adding a /y to the script doesn't even begin to cover it (Hint, if the backups are using a script then it's not a backup system, it's a kludge)