Oaksys Tech Update

Finextra reports that criminals are using a piece of Trojan software to hijack private information for home and business pc’s about financial transactions. Once the software is resident on your PC it quietly sits until you access one of 1400 different sites. It then records your login id, password, pin, credit card number, etc which is then relayed to criminals.

One of my bank accounts is with PayPal. For a princely sum of $3 they have provided me with an authentication dongle which generates a 6 digit random number that I append to my password when I log on to PayPal. It is a cheap effective way of defeat 99% of the trojan attempts to gain login details to my PayPal account.

If PaylPal can do this, why can’t the other major banks? The answer is corporate inertia. “It is not in my budget, so I’m not paying for dongle/keyfob technology.” Clearly legislation is needed to force the banks to introduce a secure login process for their clients.

Guru

One of my company Internet links is down due to the incompetence of BT OpenReach. Fortunately we have diverse links from two suppliers so we are not dead in the water. The existing link had an horrendous error rate, so after several engineer visits and a full equipment swap out the ISP (Easynet) decided to pay BT to install a new line to the premises.

The BT Openreach engineer turned up the day after the agreed date without prior notification and installed the new line. After disconnecting the old line he then discovered that the preparatory work at the exchange had not taken place.  So now we are waiting and as yet no Ready For Service date.

This negligent approach to works by BT OpenReach shows a corporate disrespect for the end-customer. It is a simple line installation which if properly organised should have been straightforward and error free.

BT are not going to get away with this disrespect. My company advises financial organisations on IT Infrastructure and we often see opportunities to improve our client’s service levels and reduce their costs by finding alternative suppliers. This advice often results in the removal or downgrading of an existing supplier. In a recent case one company we advised diverted all of their outgoing call traffic to an alternative supplier. There was no capital spend to achieve this and it halved their operational costs for call charges. At the same time we managed to double their resilience of their telecoms infrastructure.

You’ve guessed it of course. The incumbent supplier had previously annoyed our consultant. We didn’t charge our client any extra for this advice and they have saved a lot of money.

In the days when Account Managers were real people who met their clients, rather than spotty clerks sitting in a Call Centre with a CRM system, this might have been resolved amicably. We would have called a friendly account manager and warned him/her of the costly outcome of corporate negligence. Some Bean Counter somewhere probably “saved” a load of money by reducing the account managers and moving the function to a call centre. It all boils down to really knowing your customer.

Guru

I’ve just seen a Job Advert for the boss of ICT Procurement in the UK Ministry of Justice. It talks about “Supply Chain and Value Chain re-engineering”. This makes me wonder if the people specifying the job adverts actually understand the management speak jargon that they are placing in the narrative for the adverts.

Value Chain refers to the process of “adding value” to some kind of supply?  How can the MOJ add value to Computing and Telecomms? It is not a vendor. It is a consuming organisation of such facilities. Tellingly the advert specifies qualifications in Procurement and also requires an MBA. It does not require any formal qualification in IT or Communications. Could this lead to a situation where the supply of ICT is “cheap”, but doesn’t do the job effectively?

I’ve found a couple of Internet sites that are useful for decoding such gobbledydook. Predictably one is www.google.com, but enter the term “define:” at the start of your search input e.g., “define:Value Chain”

The other comprehensive list is  : Deardoff’s Glossary of International Economics

And a list of common gobbledydook words.

Hope that brightens your day!

Guru

My 25 year old daughter has flown the nest of the family home. She has her own career and her own home some 15 miles away from Lewisham in South East London. When vandals struck at the local power supply sub-station they took out the power to 60,000 people. My daughter was without power in her home for 4 solid days. She was able to come and stay back in her old bedroom, so the power outage did not affect her too much. She had a standby arrangement.

I wondered how well the local businesses fared with the power outage? Network connectivity dubious, no power for servers for 4 days, even charging mobile phones was a problem if you were stuck in the  the location of the outage.

I wonder did any of the businesses what they would do in the event of a regional power outage. Rehearsal and problem analysis is an essential part of the BCP process for those businesses. It is bad for customer relations if you don’t have effective BCP, but conversely your company will stand out if it continues its operations in the face of a regional outage.

Virtualisation of Servers is not new. This concept was in use on mainframe computers back in the 1980’s. The re-emergence of virtualisation to optimise the number of servers in the equipment racks has highlighted an old problem. As more users/transactions share a single computer the amount of disk I/O can become a bottleneck.

The success of Virtualisation replacing standalone servers depends on  the low CPU utilisation by most application processes. However virtualisation and the higher capacity of modern disks also tends to reduce the number of hard disk spindles available to share the I/O load of each user.

If a 1000 users used to share 10 distributed servers and this load is transferred to one multicore/multiprocessor server they are likely to start encountering delays due to disk I/O.  A lot can be done with solid state disks and disk virtualisation, but it requires thought and metrics.

Guru

Whilst I was writing the second book of the Adam Cranford series - “Company Mole” I needed to research how much space and weight £1 Million (Sterling) would take if someone had to move it by hand. After some internet research I couldn’t find the weight of a £20 note so I weighed £1000 using sensitive weighing scales.

It turns out that £1 Million in £20 notes would weigh around 53 Kgs and take a space of 0.7M x 0.5M x 0.3M depending on how tightly it was packed, age of notes, humidity etc.

So £1 Billion pounds would weigh about 53 tons. That is two large lorry loads full of cash.

If the UK Government has spent £50 rescuing the banks, that is 100 large truck loads of cash.

Alaric

Recently published Teen Valour

I went to a hopitality event in the City of London one evening this week. It was run by one of the suppliers of technology equipment used by investment banks. By almost common agreement there was little discussion on prospective business except the inevitable Credit Crunch. It was doubtful that the host would gain any immediate business from the event, but it did their business image no end of good. It provoked peer group introductions and renewal of acquaintances across several major City institutions. At the end of the evening there were many business cards swapping hands.There were some honest appraisals of the Host company’s performance. None of those were noticeably critical. It was a stark contrast to the cold culture of HelpDesk relationships. Some organisations pay poor heed to their customer relationships and will suffer in the future.

I’ve just received a notification from my supplier of 0871 phone numbers. New rules start on 1st August 2009.

• The receiving end (0870) will be charged 2.5 pence per minute per call;
• There must be no unacceptable delay on the service to the caller;
• There must be a price warning on adverts/literature, that calls to the number will cost 10 pence a minute or more;
• There must be a none premium rate number for complaints.

In other words all of these companies who make money by holding the public in long call queues will now find that the situation is reversed. The call queue will cost their company money. How many of these companies will have changed their adverts, websites and gained new support phone numbers in time?

Interesting times ahead.

Guru