I sat down today, relaxed and called my Cell-Phone Network provider Vodaphone to make my monthly payment – and again, as in previous months, after two attempts their Payment System was not working – thus pushing the call onto their over-stretched support desk with a long time wait to be attended to. And this, common Inconvenience got me thinking.
Have we arrived at the Tipping Point of Commercial Technology, and has it become so very over utilised to support everything that is commercial known to man? Yesterday TSB had problems (again), and I won’t bore the readership with the list of names, from Swift Payments going down, to standing at the till in the local Asda paying with multiple contactless card transactions because the systems were down!
The question is, is it that technology and the associated applications are so flaky they can’t cope? Or is it more a case of technology and the Internet providing a quick route to profit in the hands the incapable? No matter which, the bottom line is, we, the ‘public’ users are being forced into a technological cyclone in which failures occur far too often – the question really is, when will the encountered failure be so significant, it makes the Government, and those incumbent authorities like the Bank of England step in and say enough is enough. As for me, I am calling Vodaphone once more to try to make a payment!
John is the Principle at Shadow-Intelligence (Si), partnering with PALISCOPE, BreachAware and iStorage. He is a Visiting Professor at the School of Science and Technology, Nottingham, Trent University (NTU) and holds the appointment of Editor in Chief for the International Journal of Cyber Forensics and Advanced Threat Investigations (CFATI). For the last decade he has delivered training courses in the Middle, and Far East to Commercial, Industrial, the Financial Services Sector, and Military Agencies, including the UAE, US, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia (KL), Singapore, Argentina, and Sao Paulo
He served in the Royal Air Force 22 years’, specialising in Counterintelligence, working with UK Agencies such as GCHQ/CESG, and others in the fields of SIGINT, COMINT and Satellite Communications, holding appointments such as System ITSO for a CIA SCIF.
In the commercials sectors of IT/Cyber he has worked for/with Logica, Bae, T5, GM, Experian, Betfair, Palace of Westminster, House of Lords/Commons, TSol (Treasury Solicitors) and provided Consultancy to the Saudi Arabian MOD, TRA (Telecommunications Authority (Dubai) and the Military Academy of Malaysia (KL) on SOC, CSIRT, Digital Forensics and OSINT. Within the last 5 years he has focused on Geopolitics, with global expertise around the UAE and Russia, Anti-Terrorist Operations (ATO), Cyber-Warfare, Dezinformatsiya (Disinformation) and Maskirovka (Military Deception).
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