Monitoring Automation

There are many things in both our personal and business lives that are so automated, that we rarely give any thought to them until something goes wrong. A recent example of this what happened on Wall street this week...

Most brokers, companies and individuals have their investment software programs that can be set to automatically sell stock when the market value drops to or below a certain point. 

Due to volatility of the European markets this week,  a computerized sell-off sent the Dow Jones industrial average plummeting by a near-record 1,000 points within about a half-hour on  Thursday afternoon. The verdict on what caused all of  this is not completely in.  Fear that the European debt crisis could spread was a known factor in this issue. The market regained two-thirds of that loss before the end of trading that day.  However, some investors lost a great deal of money during this period.

In the best case scenario, this the automation software  goal would be to  protect the investor against  large losses when the market drops.  The simple rule that may have been forgotten here is:

"Even automated processes need to be manually monitored from time to time in order make sure that  they are functioning properly."

Some recent known examples of this kind of thing that I have see in our customer base are:

• A scheduled tape backup that had been failing nightly for almost 4 months.  - Staff were not monitoring this process, nor were their tapes being rotated. The tape drive has never been cleaned.

• There were POS Credit Card transaction batches that had been failing to settle nightly for over 3 weeks. - Staff were not monitoring this process at the location in question.

•  Multi-Site polling failures for over a two week period. - Again, staff were not monitoring this process. 

Unlike the Wall street issue, all of the these computer related items were preventable...

If you would like to have CCS check your systems for any anomaly's, please contact our Support Department.