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Non-Tech : The Y2K Newspaper -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Ounce who wrote (41)	8/21/1999 8:53:00 PM
From: C.K. Houston	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 198

Summarizing the important points of the MCI network failure debacle, involving 30,000 MCI business customers 1. A single point of failure can bring down a large section of a complex network. 2. It is not always easy to figure out exactly what is wrong, or even where the error is. Note that they still did not know exactly what caused the error more than a week after it occurred. 3. Even software that has been "certified" by a large, well respected company like Lucent can fail disastrously when it is put into production. 4. One of the main ways that errors are "worked around" is to revert to an earlier version of the software. 5. As indicated by the AT&T problem, this is not an "isolated example" with no wider significance. 6. The failure of one critical supplier can cause disaster to hundreds or thousands of businesses. 7. You can't count on suppliers to tell you what they are planning to do to their systems, even if a failed "upgrade" could have disastrous results for you. 8. You can't count on suppliers to tell you the status of their repair efforts, or to compensate you fairly for their failures without quibbling. 9. It's not necessarily easy or fast to "work around" critical failures by switching to another supplier. 10. Failures of suppliers to your suppliers (e.g., Lucent) can be just as devastating as failures by your direct suppliers. RAMIFICATIONS OF THESE POINTS WITH RESPECT TO Y2K 1. What would have happened if this were the year 2000 and MCI didn't have a Y2K compliant version of the software to fall back on? Since they still don't know what the problem was in the software that failed, the answer is obvious: they would still be out of operation, and so would their customers. 2. Testing is not equivalent to production. The software that MCI installed had been certified by Lucent, presumably after extensive testing. Yet it did not work in production. The significance of this is that every "Y2K ready" application in the world is going to go into production almost simultaneously when the clock rolls over. That is, no matter how much testing anyone has done, until their applications actually are receiving live data with dates in the year 2000, no one knows whether they will work properly in that circumstance, just as Lucent did not know that their software would not work when it was installed on MCI's switch. CONCLUSIONS A single problem of this sort can possibly be worked around by the customer, assuming alternate sources of supply. It can be worked around by the supplier if they have an older working version to fall back to. Multiple concurrent failures of critical services with no fall back available, as is likely to be the case next year, will be fatal to many organizations. koyote.com Interesting discussion here. Cheryl