British Airways IT Outage – Expert Commentary

By   ISBuzz Team
Writer , Information Security Buzz | Aug 07, 2019 12:57 pm PST

British Airways is experiencing yet another IT system failure this morning, following a similar outage it suffered last month.

The failure seems to be causing delays, confusion and frustration among the many travelers eager to get to anticipated destinations.

More information can be found here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49261497

Subscribe
Notify of
guest
2 Expert Comments
Newest
Oldest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Steve Blow
Steve Blow , Tech Evangelist
August 7, 2019 9:24 pm

The news that a systems failure has brought the summer-holiday customers of airline giant BA to a stand-still this morning might feel like déjà vu. In today’s world of ‘always-on’, no matter the length of the actual downtime, it can have a long-lasting impact and serious repercussions.

No matter how big or small a system failure is, it’s important that organizations can cope – and the airline industry is notoriously ill-prepared at ensuring uninterrupted IT operations. A second IT failure issue in this short space of time has severe business implications, ranging from frustrated customers, to damaged brand reputation, to not being able to execute revenue generating operations.

The difference between being down for hours or days versus minutes or seconds is the difference between a solid disaster recovery plan and one that is outdated, barely tested or even non-existent. Ultimately, the end goal is to maintain regular business operations so that customers will not experience any interruption or frustrations.

In these situations, many organizations may feel hopeless because the idea of revamping their IT resilience strategy seems complicated and expensive, but with the simplicity and affordability provided by cloud-based advancements, disaster recovery systems that were once only possible for the largest, wealthiest organizations are now accessible to all. So really, there seems to be really no excuse for airlines to have such impacting system failures.

Last edited 4 years ago by Steve Blow
Tim Dunton
Tim Dunton , MD
August 7, 2019 9:12 pm

Passengers will be wondering why once again a major IT outage has been allowed to ruin their travel plans and bring a major airline to a standstill. It’s vital that all organisations which operate cloud-based IT solutions have contingency plans in place, to ensure that in the event of a technical glitch or cyber-attack, normal systems can continue with minimal disruption. The reality is that incidents such as this do huge damage to customer relationships and undermine trust in the organisation’s ability to manage core processes.

Last edited 4 years ago by Tim Dunton

Recent Posts

2
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x