Tag: software failure

Software risks to the business, specifically Application Resiliency, headline a recent executive roundtable hosted by CAST and sponsored by IBM Italy, ZeroUno and the Boston Consulting Group.  European IT executives from the financial services industry assembled to debate the importance of mitigating software risks to their business.

If you've read the news lately, you've seen headline after headline (some, even on our blog) about computer glitches, technical failures, software risk, and hacks.  The health of applications is now under more microscopic attention than ever before - because no matter whether internal or external causes prompt a software outage, the security and stability of your applications are paramount.

Last Wednesday the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) underwent an IT failure which withheld 600,000 payments from customer accounts. This occurs seven months after RBS was fined ₤56 million due to an IT Crash in 2012 that impeded customers from accessing their online accounts. The poor system performance has caused difficulties for customers and shock from the banking community.

I love my job!

I’ve always been an avid writer, even as a kid. So when it came to career choices my decision to enter a profession that demanded writing skills seemed like a natural fit.

I started out as a newspaper reporter, following in my father’s footsteps, but as the jobs and money there began drying up in the mid-1990’s I took my interest in Technology and made the jump to writing for high tech companies and have been happy doing this job ever since.

My tastes in entertainment are pretty broad. While I really enjoy attending sporting events and when Bruce Springsteen is in town I lay aside nearly everything else to attend his concert (as I did in Boston on March 26), I’m also one who enjoys catching a Broadway or Off Broadway Show now and then. In fact, I over the next six weeks I will attend two Red Sox games and two shows at the New World Stages theatre in Midtown.

I’ve never been much of a horror movie fan. I think my deep-seated love and background of history and my fascination for things that are real diminishes my ability to kick back and allow my wits to be uprooted by monsters and other ghoulish figures like Jason from Friday the 13^th or Freddie Krueger from Nightmare on Elm Street.

While it was far from being the “shot heard ‘round the world” of Revolutionary War fame, the cyber attack on the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory over July 4^th weekend this year did represent a significant first blow in the search for liberty for that organization – specifically, liberty from being hacked.

I cannot believe how much our education system has changed. When I went to kindergarten, most of curriculum revolved around getting along with others (a lesson some will argue never took with me) and some basic verbal skills. I learned at my daughter's kindergarten orientation that blocks and finger painting have been replaced by geography, math, science and civics.

It’s Patch Tuesday again. The monthly rite of passage for Microsoft as it attempts to patch some of the holes in its software that it didn’t bother to fix before they put it in the box as well as those exposed after the software had been installed in millions of devices.

Last week on the East Coast Main Line, which connects London to Edinburgh, a software malfunction left five trains stranded mid-track and significantly delayed others after a power supply issue knocked out the signaling system. According to reports, software that should have instructed the backup signaling system to kick in failed to function, causing all signals on the line to default to “Red,” halting trains where they stood. The failure left more than 3,000 rail passengers stranded or delayed for more than five hours on a Saturday afternoon.