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Kate Smith

Will the future include more IT outages and fraud?

The global IT outage in July 2024 highlighted just how much operators rely on technology for a smooth operation, especially for payment and what happens when it goes wrong. 


In October (2024) Restaurant magazine teamed up with Dojo to understand how confident (or not) operators are with the tech that underpins their businesses - robust, secure tech has become a major issue and a top risk in most boardrooms. 


 

Problems actually occur much more regularly than are reported in the mainstream news. So why do problems occur and how are they remedied? More importantly how much do outages cost; in terms of immediate loss of sales, reputational damage, disruption of services, decreased productivity and more?


The outage on 19th July (‘24) caused disruption across many big industries, affecting payment and transactions, as well as general IT infrastructure (Banks, Supermarkets, Hospitals, Pharmacies, Schools, Ferries, the Stock Exchange, amongst others). The incident showed the importance of reliable tech infrastructure - suddenly there was major businesses risk and financial implications, with no prior warning.


To summarise a complicated area, IT and internet outages can happen for multiple reasons but it’s either a hardware issue, software, or human error. Main causes for outages are security related, as a result of software updates and security infrastructure changes. The July ‘24 outage was due to an update to a software security layer (from Crowdstrike, the software provider) which affected 8.5m different machines - on which all manner of business infrastructure is globally run.


While many business sectors struggled during the 2024 outage, Dojo’s card machines remained resilient, stable and reliable.

There are several reasons for this, especially when considering a lot of business tech is fragmented, often internally built and old, also evolved with multiple suppliers or third parties - then commonly underinvested in terms of being ‘future fit.



 

So what is different about Dojo, that makes it more robust and resilient?


  • Advanced technology; Dojo’s infrastructure is relatively new and cutting-edge, providing industry leading uptime of 99.9% with dual Wi-Fi/ 4G connectivity


  • Proactive monitoring; Dojo’s team continually monitor systems to identify and address issues before they impact customers (not usual or always possible on legacy systems mentioned above)


  • Transparent communication; with real-time and regular updates as below




In summary and for those less technical, Dojo’s infrastructure has been built from the ground (ie the customer) upwards, producing a secure system. So for example, there are multi-carrier 4G SIMs in every card terminal, also multi-cloud storage, across Google Cloud, Equinix and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to spread risk and ensure the impressive 99.99% uptime. Having such a set-up ensures risk, compliance and security can be best managed for Dojo’s 150,000 UK customers.


In August 2024 it was reported that losses from in-store retail fraud rose 545% in the first six months of 2024 (vs 2023). Figures from the NFIB Fraud and the Cyber Crime Dashboard showed that in store losses increased from £258,000 in 2023 to £5.4m in 2024. According to the British Retail Consortium (BRC) figures are likely to be a lot higher as only a third of incidents at retailers were reported in the last year.





Retail fraud examples include a rising number (recently 38%) of customers returning stolen items for legitimate ones, or switching price tags before buying. It’s perhaps a sad indictment of more people trying to make ends meet since the cost of living has spiked - hopefully a statistic that will naturally reduce. However, Naveed Islam, Chief Information Security Officer at Dojo says,


Where possible businesses should set aside a budget for fraud protection training to help staff feel confident to recognise common fraud tactics such as suspicious behaviours and counterfeit returns’,

also that this shouldn’t be a one-time, tick-box activity, but an ongoing investment.

Unfortunately in-store fraud, as well as all the dangers from tech (whether form hardware, software, or human error) all need to be best protected - too many businesses are finding out that ‘sticking plasters’ and cheap fixes are either too risky, or are learning the hard way as their security gets tested for real. Unfortunately while around half of small businesses in England and Wales (about 2.54m) have experienced at least one business crime in the last 2 years, according to the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), IT security remains a top risk and business priority for most industries.

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