Originally Posted by
Walnut
I am told that the systems are so interlinked that they can't even cancel individual flights hence the mass cancellations. I just hope they have got a good backup program because the system holds pax bookings for 364 days and all vital engineering records are electronic
This is classic stuff. The public demands ever increasing functionality which ends up as bolt-ons to legacy systems. The multiple layers between the core system and the application and presentation layers introduce multiple single failure opportunities , undermining the redundancy built into the core.
All the while, the systems grow so tediously complex that a BCP (business continuity plan) becomes unmaintainable. Reversion to manual systems was up until fairly recently possible. Boarding cards could be hand-written and cross checked against a common locally hosted list. I actually had this happen to me about twenty years ago in Dublin when I was on my to a (irony of ironies) BCP conference. Disaster Recovery in the IT sense is about far more than restore of a system. It is also about having the ability to maintain your core business activities with minimal or no disruption.