Indian Outsourcing Strikes Again!

[Dave Rice]

The problem the Indians have now is a shortage of suitably skilled staff.

CSC (now DXC after the merger with HP) India is absolutely massive. At the start Indian techs were managed from the UK, when I left it was often the other way around with some very senior EMEA positions filled by Indians and run from there. In fact as much as they could get away with under MOD security rules.

You have to work in the industry to really understand just what has happened and the impact it has (outsourcing that is). Of course the CEO will be in full CYA mode as will everyone else.

[JayCeeDee]

You’ll probably only get at the truth after some enterprising Journalist, who knows what he needs to look at and where that is, puts in an FOI request for details of the Outsourcing, gets refused and then appeals it. When the law tells them to reveal on threat of financial penalties for refusal, they’ll tell as much as they think they can get away with telling us. Otherwise we  just get mushroomed!! :wacko:  :good:

[Ed P]

An FOI will get nowhere with BA. The Airline is now owned by a conglomerate that includes Irish and Spanish airlines.

with respect to an FOI on MOD not a hope – they are well practised ar fending off questions to hide their many bags of worms. It would get rebutted with the ‘commercial confidentiality’ opt-out. I suppose there is a slim chance of something being revealed if you can get on a broadcast Q&A panel and ask Theresa May – how many Government  bodies outsourced their IT in 2015/16 and can we be absolutely certain that they will not suffer the catastrophic failures we have witnessed with BA? (there have been two this year) Unfortunately I would expect to see the same ducking and evasion we saw last night. Every question was answered in a similar way “We will not tell you any facts, everything will be decided by some mythical committees, and then we will ignore their recommendations a la TBLiar”. “But don’t worry we will strike a strong and stable pose while we dither”

I hope that was all just election BS otherwise I’m up for fleeing to New Zealand – the UK is doomed!

[oldtimer]

Perhaps some one will break cover. Personally I think BA is possibly one of the worlds least favourite airlines and have done for the past 30 years

Its easy when you know how

[Ed P]

It has now all been blamed on the failure of an UPS under the control of the facilities management company. El Reg has the details, but similar to the points raised by El Reg it just raises a whole bunch of ancillary more serious questions about the IT management system.

In simple terms my concerns are these:

a)  IT pros know only too well that sh*t happens and that multiple critical failures sometimes happens. Systems and procedures are designed to cope with these circumstances.  I’m sure that regardless of who was actually managing the IT there would have been an existing basic setup that handled such eventualities.

b) The procedures failed – why?

c) Why did the failure of the power in one facility knock-out the hot backup site?

d) Why did the failure of Heathrow cascade around the world crashing all other BA systems?

e) Was the failure in any way related to the Tata Cloud system used for facility management?

BA & TATA (of course) deny that the failure was related to outsourcing.

[Bob Williams]

I only flew BA once: to Vienna for a Danube cruise and back from München at the cruise end. Both times I had requested a seat months in advance, with more leg room and both times I did not get a suitable seat. Both flights were carp: awful food, cabin crew who initially refused to help put our (legally sized) cabin bag overhead. The Heathrow Renaissance Hotel had no record of our booking and only several calls to the cruise company turned up the fact that this had been passed to BA. They screwed it up.

In Vienna I was met from the aircaft by an airport lady employee who put me straight into a wheelchair and whisked me through everything to the minibus. I said that I could not walk, but in perfect English she whispered in my ear “No you cannot!”with emphasis.

I have flown over the years with various airlines and Her Majesty’s blue-uniformed one. I would say that the best short-haul of these was Air Malta. Long-haul, Lufthansa to Vancouver. BA was worse than 27 hours in a canvas seat, aboard an RAF Hercules.

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[JayCeeDee]

Well they’re still not giving any sort of plausible answers. The STORY coming out now from Willie Walsh is full of contradictions and inconsistencies – but we have been promised an investigation.

[Bob Williams]

JayCeeDee wrote:

Well they’re still not giving any sort of plausible answers. The STORY coming out now from Willie Walsh is full of contradictions and inconsistencies – but we have been promised an investigation.

I wonder about the personnel making up the investigatory body. Probably depends upon who sees the Queen tomorrow….

 

When the Thought Police arrive at your door, think -
I'm out.

[Ed P]

Nice example of what happens when you entrust your Crown Jewels and Security to a bunch of outsiders. A lot of Banks had all their digital jewels posted up on Github by a Tata employee!  I wonder what we would find if we looked for MoD stuff in the same place! El Reg has the details

[JayCeeDee]

Quote from Ed’s link –

“The data is a boon for rival organizations developing similar features, as well as criminals who could exploit any weaknesses in the designs to potentially steal millions.”

“The good news is that none of it was banking customers’ data, it was mainly auxiliary data,” Coulls told The Register late last week.”

 

How can they follow that first statement with the second, …. the individual customers might not get their account fraudulently accessed, but if the main bank lost multi-millions and went bust, all their customers are screwed.

[Ed P]

I guess he was a little lax in his writing. What I think he implied was that there would not be an immediate customer impact though shareholders may not think the same way.

In reality the blog was a long series of complaints that Canadian Banks do not take on-line security seriously. From other comments he made I’d guess that many Canadian Banks are very vulnerable and so are their customers.

[Author]

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