NYSE, United Airlines at Center of Nightmare Week for IT

At least momentarily during last week’s news cycle, for what seems like the first time in a long time, hackers and data breaches took a backseat to regular old IT glitches. On Wednesday, the New York Stock Exchange and United Airlines each suffered malfunctions that were not malicious attacks, but still caused outages and managed to nab headlines.

Let’s take a closer look at each incident and see what lessons IT pros can glean from where these organizations may have gone wrong.

New York Stock Exchange

• What went wrong: The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) was rolling out a new software release. As per its protocol, the new software was first deployed on a lone trading unit. However, as customers began logging in, there were reports of communication issues between the updated trading unit and customers’ gateways. There was speculation that customer gateways hadn’t been loaded with the proper configuration to manage the new release. An upgraded configuration was installed, but that failed to clear up the connection problems. Customers continued to report complications. The decision was made to suspend trading, cancel all open orders and work with customers to reconcile any related concerns. All customer gateways were restarted and failed over to back-up trading units so trading could resume.
• The fallout: NYSE endured its longest outage in the last decade when a software issue forced trading to be suspended for almost four hours.
• Lessons learned: Even a cautious roll out for new products or new software can lead to issues for IT. When planning changes for your line of business applications, it helps to have a partner like Arraya Solutions on your side who can help you devise low-risk roll outs and back out plans, which avoid pitfalls and vet out mistakes – such as the configuration hitches the NYSE dealt with – as well as help you mitigate issues should something go wrong.

United Airlines

• What went wrong: A faulty network router degraded connectivity strength for various United Airlines applications, including for its reservation system. This prompted a slew of delays and cancellations.
• The fallout: United canceled roughly 60 flights and delayed more than 800 others during a 90-plus-minute long, nationwide grounding.
• Lessons learned: Some experts have called out United for a lack of redundancy and emergency planning, which allowed the system to drop without a failover option to keep things afloat. However, United has defended both the reliability and redundancy of its systems, while adding that it continues to invest in making its networks more reliable. In situations like this, you need to have the right technology in place to support your disaster recovery efforts, that’s a given. On top of that, a tool like Arraya’s Alert platform can give you early warning when something isn’t right with your system. Alert customers have the peace of mind that comes with knowing Arraya’s team has eyes on their applications and systems 24/7, 365 days a year.

Arraya can help you with upgrade planning and project management and our line of Managed Services offerings are designed to extend the capabilities and sightlines of on-premises IT teams. The extra hands and skill sets the Managed Services team brings to the table can ensure smoother deployments and faster remediation of issues. The team can deliver on those outcomes while keeping operational costs in check.

To learn more about Managed Services from Arraya and what they can do for your organization or to connect with one of our Account Executives, visit us at www.ArrayaSolutions.com. Also, follow us on Twitter, @ArrayaSolutions, to stay on top of all the latest company news, offers and events.