Yesterday was rough for multiple global brands. What should have been a normal day deteriorated into multiple hours of downtime for the New York Stock Exchange and TD Ameritrade, the Wall Street Journal going offline, and stranded United Airlines travelers on 4700 flights across the globe.
The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) immediately lost trades to the competing exchanges when their network went down for almost four hours. In fact, even when the NYSE was back and operational, the traffic was slow to build back until brokers were confident in the system being operational and stable.
What was the impact?
· Integrity in the network and confidence is the NYSE systems is now in question. While the outage does not have an easily quantifiable impact on the financial markets confidence in the NYSE, it does beg the question, “how much time, effort, and resources at NYSE now need to be spent the gain that confidence back?”
· Tens of thousands of trades that were pending from the morning session had to be cancelled. Although those orders were filled through other exchanges, the amount of “rework” required and the lost productivity from the outage caused staggering down time and redundant work process for the markets.
· Regulatory is now involved. As with a highly regulated industry, a situation like this now requires regulatory agencies to get involved. An extensive and costly audit will be required and the finding may, or may not, lead to additional requirements, processes, and possibly fines for the outage.
Why does this matter to you?
Your organization may not have the same direct impact on the world financial markets as NYSE, but every business can suffer real life impacts due to technical failures.
NYSE, United, and the WSJ were not hit by a fire, flood, terrorists, or malware—the disasters appear to have been caused by normal IT operations. All organizations and businesses upgrade hardware, change software, move to different applications; these are normal business operations. Yet, these normal business operations took down some heavy hitting companies with global impacts.
The major takeaway from yesterday is that every business should be prepared. Protecting your network should be the first thing on your to do list.
What can ARG do?
Now is the time to ask, “How are you protecting your business today, and what system does your business have in place to recover from a disaster, man-made or otherwise?”
If you answered, “I’m not sure”, “yes, but I can’t tell you how”, or any delineation of the words “no” or “maybe”, ARG has the time, tools, and know how to get your company protected for life. There are too many examples of major businesses losing their ability to operate and all of their data being lost for your business to NOT be protected.
Contact ARG today to schedule a time to discuss your business recovery needs and what protection is available in the market.
