One of my stock, slightly barbed, responses to people who refute the idea of Cloud computing on the basis of trustworthiness and security goes a little something like this:
“Does your company store its most important asset, its money, underneath a large, corporate-sized mattress? No? What is the banking system, then, other than a public cloud? The people who’ve run the banks have demonstrated their trustworthiness over the past few years, yet we still trust them. And that’s because it’s the only way that makes sense to run the financial system – a series of notional zeroes and ones floating about the BACS ether. Now, tell me again why you’re worried about having your corporate email in the Cloud?”
Today, to all those folk who I have spouted that to over the past couple of years, I can tell you that that my petard has been well and truly hoisted. Yes, my friends, I bank with RBS. And today, payday, the online services tell me the balance shown on my account may not necessarily be the balance actually on my account. Too true… there’s no sign of my pay in my account.
The bank is showing a great deal of contrition, and I’m sure are doing all they can to fix what has gone wrong. It brings, though, into stark relief quite how reliant our society has become on the code that underpins the transactional systems that power institutions like banks. There is no back-up plan, no emergency mattress either individually or corporately. And as an individual my own checking of the processes these days amounts to no more that the occasional glance at my online statement to check for rogue payments: could I do a full reconciliation of my accounts after the RBS debacle is over and done with? Probably not.
At the end of all of this, will I still trust the bank enough to stay with them? Who knows. It’s the sort of problem that could have probably happened to anyone, and they seem to be being reasonably transparent with their customers as they work to resolve it. That’s all, really, you can ask for – saying “it shouldn’t have gone wrong in the first place” doesn’t help.
In the meantime, can I borrow a tenner?
mmitII 