[Video] This Two-Hour-Long Video Explains How Sainsbury's is Trying to Protect Its Microsoft-Centric 'IT' From Scrutiny After Serious and Long Downtime (Maybe Data Loss, Too)
Video download link | md5sum 928bbd1347597ce7f35121c3c6e8d224
Microsoft Sainsburygate?
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
THE PREVIOUS PARTS in this series [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] showed that Microsoft and TCS (large firm in India) were likely responsible for what happened last weekend and data may have been lost. They insist there was no security breach, but Sainsbury's already has a recent history of security breaches (Sainsbury's admitted this) and data on the majority of British citizens is at stake because nearly everyone who lives here buys something at Sainsbury's or some chain it owns, e.g. Argos. The company possesses a lot of information on almost everyone in Britain. It outsources its computer systems to an American company operating through India (probably for lower salaries).
This will hopefully be the very last part in this series, concluding a "rollercoaster" week of waiting for almost a whole week for a callback that had been promised but never happened (at some point they just started hanging up on the client, who had the audacity to ask why nobody phoned back). It has now been 100.5 hours since they made the promise to phone back. Had the encoding of the video been faster, I'd publish this exactly 100 hours later.
Have a listen to the video at the top/side. It's long but it covers many facets of the issue. A lot of companies behave similarly, in my personal experience.
When I started this I had one goal: assure there was no security breach. 2nd or secondary goal: find out the cause of the incident, NDAs notwithstanding. At a later point I became more concerned about GDPR, how to purge my shopping data etc. I never got that far. 3 out of the 4 people I spoke to were only asked (at first politely) to explain why I hadn't received the callback. Well, sometimes "the process" itself is the "news"... showing how "the system" fails clients. And regardless of the outcome, in this case it shows Sainsbury's not only outsourcing everything to Microsoft (via India) but also customer support... to India. Sainsbury's has massive income (it's 11th in the UK by revenue), so it's not short of cash to pay workers, it's just greedy and even more profitable owing to 'greedflation'.
As noted in the call, or between the calls, Sainsbury's employs people who mislead clients. The staff's words were not redacted or selectively played back (omissions). I kept it as is. Well, several of them made false promises that they would call (they also contradicted one another) and by Wednesday they decided hang up on me twice, not because I was rude but because I wanted to know when I'd get a callback and why it had taken this long (and never happened).
Sainsbury's is a really awful business and this isn't a case of "rotten apples". Sainsbury's is a very large company (total number of employees in 2020 was 111,900) and I spoke to 4 people. People can judge for themselves if I was being too harsh for insisting that they call back like they promised they would. The clients mean nothing to them unless they place orders and await (impending) payments. █