RA Question of the Week – The Hidden Switch

Each week I’m going to post a real life revenue loss example and ask you the readers, how it would be identified with your existing controls.  Hopefully some of the scenarios posted will introduce new concepts and will stimulate readers into identifying gaps within their own existing controls/software.  The question is open to both vendors and operators, but don’t worry if you don’t know the answer, as at the end of each week I will tell you how it was identified.

To start the ball rolling, I’m going to describe a very bizarre situation:

A mobile operator I was working for rented a hosted switch,  as part of the deal a fail over switch had also been provided. The operator had only set up CDR collection from the production switch as it was believed that the fail over would be dynamically allocating the IP address of production machine in the event of a failure.  No issues yet – however due to a misconfiguration/mis-understanding at the hardware provider the fail over switch had not been configured as a fail over, but instead as a second operational switch. As a result 50% of the operators events were being sent via this second switch and hence the operator was only receiving 50% of the CDRS and therefore billing only 50% of the events.

There are a couple of ways that this type of revenue loss could be identified. So the question(which will be the same each week) how would your existing controls/solutions identify this loss?