Visa and general Bank issues.

[Stryder5]

Before I retired I worked for Hewlett Packard as a Solution/System Architect. Involved in many areas including being member of a team investigating New Business Due Dilligence prior to accepting new clients large contracts for IT Outsourcing. Think Inland Revenue, Banks, Building Societies, MOD etc.

Most of the current IT Systems that Banks use are old and creaking and their connections are still not robust or resilient.

Take the latest from Visa......a component failure REALLY. Are they really admitting than their critical services have reliance on one component that is not mirrored with automatic up to date replacement?

TSB had problems when updating an Operating System. This is a normal type of update, carried out by testing on a Model Office (this is a separate non live entity that performs exactly as the live system..allegedly) before going live. When things go wrong on OS updates after testing in MO, the source of the failure can be due to the MO being Live Like but not Like Live.

Security can also be worrisome, software and hardware Firewalls are big issues

I believe in the not to distant future we may see a catastrophic failure of some large utility or corporation.

Sorry for the rant.

[Macca]

I've mentioned this before but have a mate who is a contractor and did some work for one of the big banks. Their whole system was completely lashed together and had been set up and maintained by one bloke. When he retired no-one had a clue as to where to start.

The system was so antiquated they were reduced to searching eBay for replacement parts. The bank were advised that they really needed a whole new system but they couldn't take the risk of a failure when transferring to the new system from the old because if that happened the bank would fail too. So they had no choice but to carry on lashing the old one up.

[Yomanze]

Was great fun having my contactless rejected on the tube in London yesterday, and many card machines crashing.

[Joe]

When I worked in the HE sector, there was bitter rivalry (and sometimes hatred) between what was known as the 'academic' computing bods and the 'admin' computing bods. The academic bods wanted IT systems that were new, flash, with lots of features, and which gave endless scope for tweaking. The admin blokes wanted stuff that was boring, reliable, and entirely untweakable, because their systems had to do boring but essential stuff like payroll, admissions and timetabling. Of course, the downside of the latter 'wishlist' was that all change was resisted, to the point where systems became antiquated and reliant on in-house knowledge that went when people retired or moved on.

[Stryder5]

I agree Joe, departments used to argue about scope of change (if any), when they cannot agree on scope upper management decide that change is not warranted, so nothing happens!

[Barry]

Before I retired I worked for Hewlett Packard as a Solution/System Architect. Involved in many areas including being member of a team investigating New Business Due Dilligence prior to accepting new clients large contracts for IT Outsourcing. Think Inland Revenue, Banks, Building Societies, MOD etc.

Most of the current IT Systems that Banks use are old and creaking and their connections are still not robust or resilient.

Take the latest from Visa......a component failure REALLY. Are they really admitting than their critical services have reliance on one component that is not mirrored with automatic up to date replacement?

TSB had problems when updating an Operating System. This is a normal type of update, carried out by testing on a Model Office (this is a separate non live entity that performs exactly as the live system..allegedly) before going live. When things go wrong on OS updates after testing in MO, the source of the failure can be due to the MO being Live Like but not Like Live.

Security can also be worrisome, software and hardware Firewalls are big issues

I believe in the not to distant future we may see a catastrophic failure of some large utility or corporation.

Sorry for the rant.

No need for an apology Gary. You are right, a catastrophic faliure is already waiting to happen, and the likelyhood will increase the more the public is seduced into embracing the "cashless society".

[Minstrel SE]

I will learn from this and make sure I have a fat roll of cash when on holiday in Scotland for example. I light my cigars with a fifty pound note :)

We rely on the Visa system too much and I know from experience that the banks dont spend out on good systems unless they really have to. In the 1980s I was typing away on 1960s technology....crap data lines to equipment that kept failing or they would constantly change the tapes and heaven help the customer if data wasnt backed up.

Oh and if road workmen dug up those data lines everyone was stuffed so I wonder what goes on now

Heck in the mid to late 2000s I was using software that looked as though it had been programmed on a BBC micro computer in someones bedroom.

We talked about a cashless society in the 1980s but I would always want cash in hand :)

[hifinutt]

yes TSB in big trouble over this and pester [ the boss] struggling to explain himself . its a great shame as TSB have often been the only ones who stay on the high street , i was in one village in devon at the weekend and all the banks have closed bar TSB to its credit