HSBC Outage

Following the news about the recent HSBC outage, Guillaume Ayme, IT Operations Evangelist at Splunk commented below.

Guillaume Ayme, IT Operations Evangelist at Splunk:

“Any service downtime or IT outage that means customers cannot access their financial data puts pressure on the bank or building society responsible. According to recent research into IT outages carried out by Quocirca, the average cost of service downtime to a financial services organisation is over £105,000 per event with the value of more significant outages being far higher. With companies averaging three outages per month, losses can be significant over a financial year – £3.78m over 12 months for an average financial institution. Customers have high expectations of their financial services providers, so the reputational impact can be considerable, too.

The real test is not whether you get knocked down in the first place, it’s how quickly you (and your systems) get back up and running. The infrastructure behind public facing websites and applications is often complex and based on legacy systems. These infrastructures need to be modernised to support today’s demands on digital services. This means it’s important to have a system that can monitor anomalies and provide insights into the issues affecting performance at the same time as delivering insights across old and new infrastructures to accelerate a digital transformation.”