Tokyo Stock Exchange President’s resignation tied to outage, raises questions over TSE’s Digital Transformation
Summary
The President of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, Koichiro Miyahara, is stepping down following a systems outage on October 1st which halted trading for the full day, the first time this had happened since the TSE’s shift in 1999 to a fully electronic trading system. The trading outage has been partially blamed on Fujitsu which developed the trading system in 2010 and issued an update in 2015.
Report
Analysis
While the TSE outage was not caused by a cyber-attack, the incident is another example of the critical impact that 3rd parties involvement can have on the operation of a company’s critical infrastructure, which we wrote about yesterday. In this incident at the TSE, some fault has been placed on the 2015 trading systems update which involved a change of system settings that was reportedly improperly communicated by Fujitsu to the TSE.
It also serves as a reminder of the importance of a successful digital transformation strategy and execution as the key differentiating factor between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. This as the digitization of economies, markets and company operations only accelerates further.
In addition, the consequences for C-Suite executives for digital failures, including those leading to a breach, mean cyber is evolving from ‘just another management issue’, to one of the key determinants of executive compensation and/or termination.