Experts have warned there is little most organisations can do to avoid future calamities like Friday afternoon’s horror global IT outage, as an almost ubiquitous reliance on interconnected systems provided by global tech giants means more outages are an uncomfortable fact of business life.
CrowdStrike is a well-established layer of the global tech stack. It is 13 years old, went public on the Nasdaq in 2019, and entered the S&P 500 index in June. Its shares are down 11.6 per cent since the outage was triggered. “The fact the errors ‘followed the sun’ and surfaced as staff turned on computers, means it is a good bet that its release strategy was fundamentally flawed.”Even if technology vendors took the necessary steps to decrease the risks of their software updates causing chaos, it is less clear how the businesses and citizens that consume their services can mitigate the potential harm of changes outside their control.
“As a global community, we need the hyperscale vendors to understand that this was their one and only chance; it was a truly trusted vendor, and it was truly awful. “To prevent future failures, the IT industry must prioritise resilience and diversity. This means not only diversifying software and hardware providers, but also implementing more robust testing and update procedures to ensure that a single point of failure does not bring down entire systems.
This, however, leaves the organisation vulnerable to cyberattacks as the latest security updates are not installed.