There have been a couple of events recently which have demonstrated all is not as rosy in the web-based transaction world as the evangelists would have us think. It has been proven beyond a shadow of doubt that while it may be truly whizzy, running any sort of business via a website can be fraught with problems, particularly if you own the kit.

Let’s take the silly event first. It’s silly in as much as EasyJet was dumb and unthinking in its actions, though I doubt any malice was intended at all. To promote it’s `green’ agenda the airline used its customer newsletter to get them to cut and paste a boilerplate lobbying letter to their MPs and send it via the Charity web service, WriteToThem.com. So they did, in sufficient numbers to far exceed the Charity’s bandwidth allocation. The service promptly died. Many tears and a donation to the charity later things have been resolved and in the great scheme of things, not too much damage has been done.

The other event, of course, was somewhat more serious – Northern Rock and the ensuing flak it has received about the failure of its online service (as well as its branch-based service) to cough up customers savings on demand, in an instant.

I have seen the company castigated for failing to plan for unforeseen and unprecedented demand and therefore not laying in emergency capacity. Well, yes, in theory perhaps, but from where, and how much, and for how long?

This isn’t Second Life where you might flick your fingers and a small miracle happens. This is real life. And how do you actually plan for something that hasn’t happened for 140 years or more? How do the experiences of a quill-pen era relate to web-based transactions? Also, let’s not forget that there is speculation that the situation wouldn’t have happened at all if different Government actions were taken at different times.

I suspect this is where Risk Analysis and predicting the future through Rune Reading or that Friends Reunited prototype, the Ouija Board, get awfully closed to being the same thing.

Risk comes in many forms for any bank, of course, and one of them is to commit too much Cap Ex investment to services that are, in a risk analysis sense, definably no risk at all. What should they do, buy hundreds of servers to stand by, waiting, just in case? And they’d have to be upgraded of course, say every four years? On current statistics from the field that would be 35 upgrades of hardware that would probably never be used – and let’s not mention the software licences.

So there is no International Rescue waiting to come over the hill at 23:59:59? Well, no, not in situations like this and not if companies insist on owning the kit – or at least `owning’ the right to a defined lump of bandwidth. But it could exist in a different way.

The last few days have, in fact, been one of the best testimonials to the need to move towards a utility-based infrastructure – where that notion of `owning’ is restricted to `your data’ rather than `your computers (and the rest)’.

That way, there would be sufficient resources available to accommodate almost instant re-assignment to an emergency requirement like Northern Rock. And let’s not forget that half the problem was that once the story was out about the web-service `failing’ the more customers started to twitch and panic, making things worse. Just one story saying `web service still working fine’ would have calmed most of that very quickly.

The Utility Model won’t happen too quickly, of course, not least because users are still so attached to owning their infrastructure when it is only the information that actually worth claiming as `theirs’. Face it, no company can buy the resources needed to cope with a might-happen situation like Northern Rock’s and then have them standing around, idle.

I bet every vendor will be saying they should do just that, of course. They’ll probably even offer a small discount for bulk orders on scheduled call-off.