Last week we had a disaster with our production system. About a month prior, we had switched over from FTP to a more secure mechanism to transfer files. The secure mechanism was a proprietary one from our customer. There was one problem with this plan. We did not have an environment to test this. The production environment became our test bed.The first transfer worked fine. Everybody thought the transition worked out ok. Then we all got busy with other work. After a few weeks, the customer realized that the transfers did not work after the first day. Doh. The end result was that the customer lost a lot of money. I am afraid heads may have to roll for this one.
The top brass from the customer organization want an investigation as to how this happened in the first place. They want to be sure that it never happens again. Our company is stating that we will need a test environment to simulate production, otherwise we cannot guarantee anything. Now might not be the time to be making demands. Otherwise we may be losing this big customer. I will let you know how this pans out.
