T 4.48 Failure of an outsourcing service provider's systems

At an outsourcing service provider, the IT systems might fail partially or completely, which also has an impact on the customer.

Even if the IT failure only affects several systems or applications, this might result in data processing being performed inconsistently or improperly.

In addition, it must be taken into account that the failure of just one system, regardless of whether or not it has been allocated to the customer, may still impair the customer's IT operations if the IT systems of the service provider are inadequately structured or improperly isolated. This can always be a problem if individual IT components (e.g. host computers, firewalls) of a service provider are shared by different customers. When using host processing, for example, an error in the database of any of the customers of the outsourcing service provider may, under certain circumstances, force a halt of batch processing for several other customers if batch processing is poorly or incorrectly configured.

Similar problems may arise when the connection between the outsourcing organisation and outsourcing service provider fails.