The recent bank system collapse that has thousands out of pocket, many in over-draft and many in serious debt thanks to days without being able to access accounts is down to several key factors.
The first is shoddy, cheap outsourcing to India. I’ve experienced Indian outsourcing, and if it’s not easy then it’s not going to be done to the standard you need. Defecting batch scheduling software, and bad maintenance of it because devops crews were outsourced to cheap Indian remote call centers means simple tasks failed on their systems, which are still not back up at time of writing.
Note I’m not saying all Indian outsourcing is bad, just when it’s cheap and crappy companies who don’t quite know what they’re doing.
RBS do use CA-7 and do update all accounts overnight on a mainframe via thousands of batch jobs scheduled by CA-7 … Backing out of a failed update to CA-7 really ought to have been a trivial matter for experienced operations and systems programming staff, especially if they knew that an update had been made. That this was not the case tends to imply that the criticisms of the policy to “off-shore” also hold some water.
Good scoop for TheRegister…
