How come nothing ever goes through on like a balance sheet when online banking over the weekend? It always updates on Monday it seems like. What’s that all about?
In: Economics
Here’s an IT point of view of this (EU) – we need the weekends off to be able to upgrade/update/correct/etc our systems. The weekend is the only time we actually can freely take down our entire ”platform” so to speak, and go nuts on it. If we were operational 7days a week, that would leave us with only 4 hours a night to work with (and by 4, I mean when you hit that 4:00 you need to be done done) – and the system would have to be perfectly up and running after it immediately.
Obviously, this would be a clusterduck because you would not have time to manage any errors/ newfound production issues/ observe systems and logs/ etc. Due to regulations, its is unacceptable that we are offline during ”work time” – some systems operate on a limit with few seconds – downtime of even 1 minute is considered a super critical problem and would make the bank liable for some serious penalties. Other systems need to be brough up within hours, and some have a “one time a day” window – you miss it, you’re in the toilet.
Shutting down a system and bringing it back up is a nerve wracking thing. Even when you are doing only a restart with no changes. Any glitch will absolutely ruin your day/weekend/week/month depending on how bad it gets, with ton of business people and regulators barging down the hallway screaming in panic and asking a million questions while you are desperately trying to get things back in working order.
I know this isn’t exacly what is being asked, but figured people might like some more insight into what goes on behind the scenes.
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