Food for thought – What did we learn from the recent outage?

Food for thought – What did we learn from the recent outage?

The recent outage is like a faulty security system update for a massive office building. Let me break it down for you in plain English: CrowdStrike is a top-notch security company providing high-tech protection for countless important buildings (computers and networks) around the globe. Recently, they sent out an update meant to beef up security, but you know what happened!

Instead of enhancing security, the update essentially "locked" everyone (using Windows hosts) out of their buildings (computers). Imagine the security system glitching and stopping everyone from entering their offices, causing chaos everywhere. Picture this:

This issue is so massive that it impacted sectors worldwide, from airports and government departments to hospitals. Poor Technicians had to manually "unlock" each affected building (computer) one by one, which is challenging for mission critical businesses.

This incident is being hailed as potentially one of the biggest IT outages in history because of its global impact on businesses and organizations. It underscores the danger of relying too much on a single security provider for critical systems. This is devastating for the economy. So, can this be “fail safe”?

Allow me to hypothesize: How did we get here? Stiff competition across all industries mandated Digital Transformation (DX). COVID accelerated the adoption. Cloud Economics, Productivity, Efficiency, Board Room pressures mandated Cloud Migration. This in turn, expanded business’ foot print outside their “secure” firewall and exposed their attack surface to the bad actors/hackers. Cyber Security became mandatory. With it came the “rats’ race” of software updates that needed to catch up with Hackers/Cybercrime. This became the norm to keep our mission critical systems up and running. Before we realized, businesses were, knowingly or unknowingly dependent on single backbone system that can make or break them.

Time for us think about any potential solutions to combat this. Let’s go back to that first image of all employees stranded outside the locked office. What if these businesses had an emergency door that did not depend on the same technology as the main door? What if this emergency door got initiated by an AI/ML system (automated issue resolution) for critical times like this? Could they have entered their buildings using this emergency door to unlock the main entrance?

Now, could hackers use this emergency door too? Sure, but you'd need to secure that as well, and preferably not with the same technology as the main door. Food for thought!

Do you agree? Any other Fail-Safe thoughts?