Daylight-Saving Time Change: Bigger than Y2K?

Although nobody’s crystal ball is clear on the impact that the change in the daylight-saving time rules will have on enterprise IT systems and applications, the problems could be bigger than most people realize.

That’s because IT shops have had less notice in dealing with the time change than they did for Y2K, and because the issue doesn’t have visibility at the highest levels of an organization as it did for Y2K.

“We are likely to see more issues than we did with Y2K because there is no visibility at the board and the CEO level, yet it’s a similar risk to the business,” said Tim Howes, CTO at data center provisioning provider Opsware in Sunnyvale, CA.

“Only server administrators and application support teams know what could happen if time stamps get misaligned. A lot of these administrators are sweating bullets right now,” said Swapnil Shah, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at mValent, a configuration and change management provider in Burlington, Mass.

The U.S. will enter DST at 2 a.m. local time March 11—three weeks earlier than nearly all computer hardware and software written since 1986 are expecting. Click here to read more.

Although both Howes and Shah have a vested interest in that perspective—both are hawking tools or services that can help automate the process of deploying patches and discovering which systems have been addressed—industry analysts believe that IT shops using such tools are ahead of the game.

“Those using configuration management, application lifecycle methodologies and automated testing tools are ahead of the game,” said Ray Wang, principal analyst with Forrester Research in Foster City, Calif.

Read the full story on eWeek: Daylight-Saving Time Change: Bigger than Y2K?