ISOTs and card payments (banking system in general)

Buba

A total creep
I remember 2014 sanctions against Russia.
VISA and Mastercard participated which caused problems with card transactions in the country, as such payments are processed in the USA ...
In response Russia set up its own system - Mir (good for you, Russia!). I'm fairly certain that China also is self reliant as far as card transacations are concerned - Union Pay.

I practically never, ever see ISOTs where the financial system crashes. No, no seree, everybody just hops to the store/ATM and uses his or her debit/credit card as usual. I suppose that if the whole US or China is ISOTed then this might be the case, but not for smaller countries.

So, if e.g. the UK of 2021 is ISOTed - will card payments work or not? Where are the servers located? Which cards will be hit harder? I'm fairly sure that one of the two - but I don't remember whether VISA or Mastercard - is more decentralised, with the other having a few server farms in the US to do the whole work.
Or what about Germany (Girocard will work, right?), France, Italy? Are there local payment systems there (allied to the Big Two) with their own processing facilities in situ?

BTW - I do not have much e-financial knowledge, so poke holes in my theories. Or simply point and laff :)
 
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PsihoKekec

Swashbuckling Accountant
So, if e.g. the UK of 2021 is ISOTed
I think most international banking systems have their European servers in UK so they should be fine in this regard. Other countries would be hit badly though, as in the last 10-15 years these services were greatly centralised.
 

IceWing_mk1

Well-known member
As somebody who has worked on multiple ecommerce projects, I've got some peripheral knowledge.

Mind you, my answer today and 10 years ago would be different.

In short, it depends. A large portion of the businesses globally are migrating to the 'cloud' as opposed to have their own physical servers, either in their own server rooms, or in server farms.

And, in reality, that's all the cloud is: a BUNCH of server farms, all running a BUNCH of virtualized servers, which can be spun up or down as needed. The only difference, in reality, is now it's Microsoft, Google and Amazon owning those server farms, and your organization is getting tools to maintain them digitally, plus, you know, the bill for cycle time and bandwidth.

So, if the UK is ISOTed in 2021, I'd ask the question of if ENOUGH of the cloud server farms are in the UK, and are the instance images needed to spin up new instances on demand AND the databases (which are a bit harder to deal with in reality) also located in the UK? How does the DNS system react?

Also, remember when there was a solar storm a decade ago, there were instances of gas stations not being able to interact with their pumps because they lost communication with the terminal inside the station for some bizarre reason involving satellites. So, there is definitely going to be a bit of an impact because ALL of IT assumes certain infrastructure will be in place. Oh, your app is poorly\deliberately coded and won't work without GPS location data... Sorry, that app is offline till they patch it (and, oh yeah, is there a cached copy of the Apple\Android App Store in the UK? What about the approval team to log in and move your app through the apple certified approval workflow so people can download it? Oh, all those people are uptime and nobody has the passwords... guess your entire Apple required infrastructure is shot...)

And this is about 5 minutes of thinking it through.

Personally, I am collecting local (and backed up) copies of ANYTHING I find interesting or useful, because I know how brittle ALL of the infrastructure is.
 

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