U.S. Daylight Saving time shift poses a risk for IT
Research firm Gartner cautioned that infrastructure and application level disruptions are likely to occur, especially within calendaring, billing applications and security applications, as well as in handling travel and trading schedules, starting March 11.
...the impact will extend outside of the United States and any organisation that interacts with U.S. business partners will also need to undertake a review of their time-related exposures which could include: Calendaring applications (including BlackBerry-style devices synching with an e-mail server) showing incorrect recurring meeting schedules
- Incorrect times for arrivals and departures within the travel industry
- Bank transaction errors, manifesting in late payments
- Trading applications executing purchases and sales at the incorrect time
- Missed deadlines for admissions and other time-sensitive enrolment programs
- Auctions ending earlier, impacting late bids
- Cell phone and other tariff billing applications incorrectly charging peak rates during non-peak times
- Batch recovery, rollback and job scheduling processes operating off incorrect journal timestamps
- Security programs improperly denying access to IT resources
The Daylight Saving Time issue is far more minor that Y2K was, but companies that don't apply the appropriate patches or workarounds over the next month will be taking unnecessary risks.