Sarbannes Oxley .. the next Y2K?
Somehow, don't ask me how, this has translated into additional hardening requirements for our servers. Which means I get to do my least favorite task, coordinating downtime for servers among multiple groups at Sun.
It got me thinking, though, about all those articles I've read. About how so and so company had to spend thousands, even millions on upgrades to software and even hardware to comply with the Sarbannes Oxley reporting requirements. It was a flashback for me to the Y2K days. Where if you didn't have a later model PC or server, patched up the wazoo, doom and despair would surely occur on New Years Day.
We've already talked about my marvellous sense of timing. I was, you got it, in QA for the year 1999. Fortunately my product was a combo software development environment plus appserver, not much to worry about, or so you would think. The problem was that it ran on all sorts of platforms, Unix, Windows, VMS, six different databases. And we had to certify our product against the Y2K patches all of these vendors produced. Certification meant running a whole slew of automated test suites against the product on various platform combos (ie. WindowsNT / Oracle). The other problem is the vendors kept generating patches.. whoops, we found another obscure edge case that might be a problem for Y2K, better patch it so we can't be sued. At some point we had to say enough was enough, put our stake in the ground, just so we could get our "Y2K" certified product out the door.
Lots of money spent on Y2K. Seems like lot of money being spent on Sarbannes-Oxley. Maybe I'm stretching it a bit, but could SOX be the reason that the tech economy is lifting out of the doldrums? I mean, might as well buy some hardware for that new accounting system as well. Food for thought.
Kathy
