Standard Bank needs a disaster recovery plan

First FNB was down, now Standard Bank is down.

JOHANNESBURG - I'm left in awe that a commercial giant like Standard Bank can exhibit such utter incompetence when there's an IT problem.

Evidently as a result of some sort of attack, their Internet Banking service went down yesterday. They claim it was for a very brief period. However, over an 18 hour period (only during office hours) I still got answers from their Internet Banking call centre conceding that there were problems.

Yesterday afternoon I called into Talk Radio 702's Eyewitness News Desk to report the problem and was told they'd look into it but there was only one person at Standard Bank permitted to talk to the media - Erik Larsen - and he 'wasn't always easily available'. Hmm. What's the point in paying him then?

I don't care (as the marketing people have subsequently told me) that the attack affected the bank's 'ability to commu...