NatWest/RBS debacle shows how IT has failed to keep pace with operations

Increased need for large-scale customer access left bank's IT behind, says UC4 CMO

While RBS Group seems to be suggesting that its IT problems are almost at an end, debate still rages in the industry as to what work practices may lie at the heart of the banking group's technical failings over the past week.

CMO of software automation firm UC4, Randy Clark, believes that the need for everyday company operations to have access to web-scale infrastructure and rapid application delivery has created what he calls a "perfect storm" for IT managers.

"While they weather a lot of storms successfully," said Clark, "the recent outages at NatWest and RBS painfully show the costs of these operations storms. Operations has gone web-scale and IT has yet to catch up," said Clark.

In the mainframe and distributed computing days, explained Clark, applications were tethered to physical machines, which meant that "throwing more hardware and software testing at the problem" reduced failure risk to acceptable levels.

But today, said Clark, "VM-sprawl, agile applications, and mobile access are causing inter-dependencies between IT components to skyrocket. Simply put, interdependencies are scaling faster than IT. Worse yet, the complexity is now beyond the human ability to see or manage it."

Clark's solution is to follow the example of service providers and design systems for web-scale from the ground up. "WebOps thinking will cause a rethink of current IT architectures to more standard, simpler and scalable levels of abstraction," said Clark.

"This is nothing new in the history of enterprise IT. We did it going from mainframes to distributed computing. However, as usual, this time it's happening faster and with bigger consequences.

"We can call it whatever we want, but it's time for operations to rethink their approach to automation," Clark concluded.

• The RBS Group could face a total bill of £100m or more from debacle, according to a Reuters report.