Even if it didn’t directly affect you, you have probably heard about the Crowdsrike outage that caused critical errors in a lot of Microsoft-run systems. Due to the sheer volume of companies and organizations that are using Windows, this error caused an unprecedented amount of computers to crash and took down over 8.5 million systems for extended periods and cost some of the most successful businesses billions of dollars. It was also noteworthy for affecting air travel, causing 3,000 flights to be canceled and wreaking havoc on people’s travel plans. As the largest outage in world history, it made a lot of people realize that the technology that we all depend on for our livelihoods isn’t infallible. Today, let's take a look at some of the things we should take away from the CrowdStrike outage.
Lesson #1 - The Cloud Is Just Computers
The first thing we should take away from this unprecedented event is that cloud computing, as good as it is, has many of the same drawbacks that any other computing platform has. A cloud server is just a computer in a data center and if some bad code from a reliable security source can cause such a huge outage, imagine what could happen if someone with the aim to cause computing systems to fail could potentially accomplish. By now most businesses depend on cloud computing for one thing or another and we all assume that the uptime and availability that comes with cloud-based products depends most on the reliability of the Internet connection on the user’s end. Ultimately, cloud servers are just computers and businesses need to understand that the redundancy of their organization’s data shouldn’t be left to a third-party vendor exclusively.
Lesson #2 - Have Agile IT Support
Since we depend on computing systems for nearly everything, it stands to reason that having a robust IT support system in place in your business can save you thousands (or in some cases millions) of dollars. For companies that were affected by the CrowdStrike outage, having the ability to roll back updates was huge. Some organizations are just so massive that there is no possible way to confront this issue immediately, but for smaller organizations, having an IT support team that could quickly diagnose and remediate the issue could be the difference between getting your team up and running quickly or incurring a lot of costly downtime.
Lesson #3 - Comprehensive Business Continuity and Training
Bad things happen. That’s true for any perspective, but when computing systems start to fail, it can be a massive problem for any organization. As we saw when COVID-19 hit and many businesses didn’t have an answer for the specific operational problems that situation brought, having a plan in place should situations like computer or network failure happen, is extremely important. Having a thorough business continuity platform in place that has contingencies built in for hardware and software failures, complete with specific assignments and training can significantly help your business handle technology issues.
If you would like to have a conversation about how you would confront operational problems that could stem from critical IT failures, call the IT experts at Data Net today at (760) 466-1200.
