The big new story yesterday was the closure of Manchester airport due to power failures. All flights were cancelled on Saturday from two of the terminals with passengers left stranded and nowhere to go for many hours.
Now as a former IT manager I can advise this simply should not happen. Even 40 years ago when I ran the IT operations of a major UK retailer the object was to keep our IT systems up and running for 24-hours a day with minimal downtime and that was achieved. We had disaster recovery plans to cope with hardware and power failures. We needed 100% uptime to enable us to process shop orders. We were never out of action for more than a few minutes.
The NHS is plagued with similar problems of lack of provision for IT failures. The latest news is that the service who provide blood testing to Guys Hospital have been subject to a ransomware attack and have exposed my personal information on the web, presumably after they refused to pay. The service was out of action for some days. Did they not have a back-up and recovery plan they could invoke?
The exact reason for their exposure to a ransomware attack has not yet been revealed but it is probably due to hacks of password access or insecure web systems. Intercede (IGP), in which I hold shares, can improve the security of personal log-ins via identity verification which is essential for any large organisation which is vulnerable to attacks. The failure of the NHS to protect its systems and that of its sub-contractors is surely down to incompetent management which is a persistent theme in the NHS.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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