Online Banking sytsem fails !!!!!!!!

When I heard the news that crisis-hit Northern Rock's website had crashed last Friday under the weight of numbers of online savers trying to withdraw their money, I immediately thought, "Thank goodness I am not the IT director of Northern Rock today."

Banks like Northern Rock spend millions of dollars a year on their internet banking systems. They will have servers with configuration of latest cutting edge technology, to do the hard work and several experts to look after them.

Probable Solutions :

Firstly, a bank such as Northern Rock can make sure it has enough computer servers on standby, ready to swing in to action if the need arises. This can be very expensive, because for 99.9% of the time, the bank will have large numbers of servers will be idle.
However, a bank can make an arrangement with an IT company to provide the extra capacity to handle the traffic "on demand".

Secondly, a bank can put in a throttle of some sort to slow down the number of customers hitting the system second by second. The website will get slower and slower but will not crash suddenly in a overload situation on its servers. Typically, when it gets frustratingly slow, customers are automatically diverted to another temporary website which will take their contact details, perhaps their instructions, and get back to them as soon as possible.

However, some banks are focused onefficient operation and cost control above all else. They may take the view that the risk to their reputation is outweighed by the financial benefit of saving money by not putting in place contingency plans for these rare and more extreme occasions.

One of the root problems in many banks is that the business people who run the bank do not understand computers. They only understand the profits and gains in buying and selling so they end up in buying computers for cheap rate, they even don't think about the configuration of such computers and this online traffic handling is like Hebrew script for them.

I heard that there are bankers in the UK today who even get their secretary to print out all their e-mails and put them in a folder every morning! But in the age of the internet, that is completely unacceptable. Meanwhile, the IT pals don't know how to explain what they do or, more importantly, what risks are being taken as a result of the IT decisions being made.

On a day like last Friday, the scene in the IT department at Northern Rock would have been frenzied. The bank will have systems that monitor the main online banking system to alert people if there is a problem. There were probably traffic alerting monitors showing exactly what was happening, second by second, like a mission control center. That's where the IT director would have been, pacing up and down, watching developments. The alarm bells would have started ringing long before the website crashed.
It's a race against time to beef up capacity, but unfortunately on this occasion, the customer volumes grew just too quickly - and horror of horrors, the site crashed.



One thing you can be sure of, though - you learn fast in a crisis.