Independent

This small IT consulting outfit gets a contract with a very, very big company — which is a very big deal, says a pilot fish at the consultancy.

“On a daily basis, a large text data file needs to get loaded into a very fast database, and that information is used to deal or not deal with certain customers,” fish explains. “And this all has to happen in real time.”

The big client is very security conscious, and it won’t let the consultancy download the data from the client’s site. Instead, a third-party site is used, and access is through a secure connection with a totally inscrutable password.

And on the first day, everything works fine. The big client puts the data on the site and fish’s company downloads the data, then keeps checking back periodically to see if anything has been added or changed.

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It’s 1999, and in this IT department the big crisis isn’t Y2k, says a pilot fish there — it’s the Melissa virus.

“We were infected, and we were all called into the Emergency Operations Center to devise a strategy to determine the extent of infection and how to mitigate the effects,” fish says.

“The server admins were coming up with methods to clean up any servers that were affected. The desktop group was trying to figure out how many desktops were infected. We in the network group were trying to come up with a way to block traffic from the virus, both inbound and outbound, at the firewalls.

“Everything was moving as well as could be expected, but we had to give an update to senior leadership on progress.

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