Under-investment in IT Can Cause Major Issues – Look at RBS

In the aftermath of RBS system crash on Cyber Monday, which broke the record for the busiest online shopping day, Ross McEwan the boss of the Royal Bank of Scotland group made the astonishing admission that ‘years of underinvestment led to an unacceptable IT crash’.

He apologised for the technical faults and some analysts claim the problems could cost RBS up to £1bn to rectify.

Ross McEwan has stated that they need to put their customers’ needs first and they are now heavily investing in building IT systems customers can rely on as “they know they have to do better”.

In 2000 RBS made massive cost saving after buying NatWest and combining the two banks’ IT systems, however this cost saving has come back to haunt RBS with them now having to pay out significant costs from damages and also the bad press that followed the crash.

The NatWest customers were migrated onto RBS’s cheaper to run but inferior system to try and save more money but as proved by the recent problems the system couldn’t cope. RBS considered IT as something they didn't need to invest in, but as the recent comments suggest their mind set has changed and they now realise how important they IT infrastructure is.

Whether you are running Oracle Databases, EBS or SQL Servers your IT Infrastructure is core to your business performance. IT should not be something that is forgotten, it is important to keep investing in making sure it can cope with the current demands of your business and if it will cope with the future goals and objectives of your organisation.

dsp are IT Database and application layer specialists, we understand how critical these systems are to your organisation that is why we have an award winning team for both Professional Services and Managed Services so not only can we build and run your systems but also monitor and support them to the highest standard.