Support operations

I sometimes hear that plenty of large commercial operations, in their quest to improve their bottom line today, are squeezing hard on their support operations, all that stuff that goes on in the back office but which does not generate income.

So a squeeze on accountants may have accounted for the supply chain accounting scandal which engulfed Tesco's a few years ago. Similar squeezes elsewhere may have resulted in accidents waiting to happen. Balance sheets which are going to start flashing red all over the place.

While a squeeze on IT may account for the BA security lapse - not to say scandal - whereby they have lost bank details of rather a lot of their customers, a loss which presumably means that all those customers have got to replace the bank cards involved and all the insurance companies involved have got to pay for the damage. IT security is expensive, with it being a sellers' market for IT security work, with all those people expensively trained at public expense at places like GCHQ doing very nicely thank you - so given that the threat, by its nature, is more or less invisible, it would be easy for BA senior management to think that they could rein back a bit on all those contractors. All this IT security stuff is just a bit of a con really. Until you get bitten.

It seems quite likely that Ryanair, which works especially hard on costs, is - or at least was until a few days ago - was even more vulnerable. But then, hacking Ryanair does not have quite the same cachet as hacking a blue chip operation like BA.

PS: speaking for myself, it is a great convenience that Microsoft have taken on the whole business of protecting one's PC. No need to think about it all, which is how I like it. Security far too much like hard work for the aging brain. Although I do go so far as to check that it is updating the threat definition files on a more or less regular basis and I am reasonably careful about passwords.