Cloud Punishement: Commonwealth Bank CIO and team take a pay hit on online outage

Before we start jumping to conclusions I just want to point ou to some funny facts of a financial institution where you and I lend/save our money in.

A bank gets hacked and is badly hit by DOS attacks. Didn’t they have any form of security in place? Anything?

I’ll leave you guys to decide. In any case the interesting thing to note is that the accountability is coming to the department itself and they are taking the hit. My previous profession in the energy sector was more or less the same. Accountability and punishment was very direct, it never felt harsh. I didn’t make millions annually but made a lot more than what I make today. Maritime industry had consolidated dramatically, if you look at the container vessels that come into LA or Rotterdam, you can see how fast the work goes on there as well. I never experienced that as I preferred the gas/oil sector [energy as they prefer to be called]. Very minimal staff, all multi-taskers, no double role/functions, not a single moment to B.S around and you get punished if something happens on your watch. Literally! So if you’re on the bridge, you’re the CEO and you’re on watch.

We also stood for each other. My wife still laments: “You’ve left a honorable profession, you were a real man then!” Yup, I carried those massive American wrenches and turned huge valves that went down some 30-40 meters deep. But before you start getting a rosy pictures on it, it was hard work out there. And that is what I am suspecting will happen in the cloud space soon. As applications and the whole fabric is metered and you just “follow your service”, things will also be measured and folks awarded bonus or penalty points.

Netbank fell over in June under the weight of unprecedented levels of traffic, sparking speculation it had fallen prey to a massive Denial of Service attack by hackers.

At a press briefing, Harte has now revealed that the outage led to a pay hit for him and members of his team.

“It affected mine. And it affected a lot of people in this room,” he revealed at press briefing attended by CBA head of online, Tim Whitely, head of core banking, Dave Curran and the lead for a Telstra telecommunications project, Nick Holdsworth

According to local press reports, the CIO was paid around A$2.8 million for the year but the amount deducted for the outage was not disclosed.

The pay hit is part of CBA’s new focus on customer satisfaction, which is now a key performance indicator for 40% of “at risk pay” for the enterprise services team.

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