Bank crashes force rethink

Beverley Head
Monday, 06 September 2010 15:05

Business IT - Technology

Three of Australia’s four major banks – the ANZ, Commonwealth and Westpac have endured highly visible and lengthy systems failures in the last fortnight. Unless they further automate their data centres, and minimise human intervention, such outages are likely to continue and possibly worsen.

That is the message from Chip Salyards, vice president for BMC Software in Asia Pacific. Mr Salyards who has been visiting Australian clients – including some of Australia’s big four banks - believes that there is still too much human involvement running data centres and large enterprise IT systems – and that’s what can lead to system failures.

As the three big banks which endured systems failures know, computer crashes can prove a public relations nightmare. ANZ’s in-store eftpos system went awry first, leaving merchants and customers frustrated for several hours; last Monday CBA’s eftpos and ATM network went haywire for a good part of the day; and in the middle of the week Westpac’s online banking platform was unavailable for nine hours.

“These people are Westpac are smart people – but it’s the complexity of the environment,” according to Mr Salyards, and that complexity demands automated management and fault prediction.

The one bank which has emerged from the last fortnight unscathed is NAB. It is a BMC client and according to Mr Salyards “75 per cent of the way there,” in terms of a migration to data centre automation.

BMC sells tools that can provide early detection of potential problems, alert (preferably) a computer system or individual to the issue, route that using ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) procedures to determine what is required as a fix, then automatically fix the problem and finally report on the process.

The ultimate goal is to have a data centre operate as a blackbox, with little or no human intervention. By automating management of the data centre it should be possible to reduce the systems engineering headcount by a factor of four Mr Salyards said.