* Posts by Aralivas

1 publicly visible post • joined 29 May 2017

BA's 'global IT system failure' was due to 'power surge'

Aralivas

Re: "Tirelessly"?

I work in IT operations of different banks since almost 30 years .

Unfortunately I experienced the same trend in all banks I works for : outsourcing the IT to offshore.

And each time the result was the same . Poor service and a lot of disruption and miscommunication between offshore teams and local teams.

However I cannot understand how a major airline company like BA does not have a tested and validated disaster recovery plan.

In banks it's a common practice to do DR drills each year and validated all critical applications in case of a major incident (fire, power outage, earth quake etc).

During those drills which takes place on two weekends all IT staff is present and they simulate the full outage of a data center and try to bring up the most critical applications on the second data center. Normally the applications should be up in less than two hours , otherwise the DR test is supposed to be a failure.

Failure of a power supply is not a valid reason these days. The UPS (uninterrupted power supply) with strong batteries are able to keep up the most critical systems and servers for 24 hours or more.

If the British Airways' IT director decided not to have a disaster recovery data center and not to perform such disaster recovery drills yearly then he has to be fired ! This is the basics of a Tier 0 ( critical applications) IT architecture.

The bad news is that if the BA does not improve its IT architecture it means the same issue could happen again.