Resilience Matters !

The IT tsunami that was the Crowdstrike global IT meltdown, revealed to the general public, just how interconnected the world really is.

It's easy for us to go about our daily business never thinking about how we communicate with colleagues, clients, friends and family. It's easy to simply assume that when we flick the switch, the lights come on, every time. But alas as the world becomes ever more connected, these issues, whether by accident or design will become more prevalent.

Think about it like this; the technology we use today, as useful and engaging as it is, helping us to run our busy lives, sits on top of technology that in some cases dates back over 20 or maybe more years. Put simply this means unless the foundations are looked after, it's likely that the more we build on this so-called 'legacy IT stack', the more fragile our technology enabled existence becomes.

Think of it if you will as a wall, the higher you go, the less structurally secure this wall becomes. Unless of course you pull the wall down, every time, then you are left with brick upon brick of increasingly less structural integrity. Of course I'm aware that this is rather a simplistic analogy, but there is considered truth held within and not all business solutions sit atop shaky foundations. But, you would be surprised how many really do. The choice, whilst it may be simple, is not an easy one to fix. We have the challenge of rebuilding the wall with newer bricks every time we add something additional on top. Or we carefully and methodically plan how the integrity of the wall can withstand its new additions.

Neither approach is ideal, but we are where we are, faced with stark choices, of rip-and-replace, with all the associated costs and time constraints, or keep on building. Both have consequences and require money to enable progress to happen. And here's the 'rub' it's in the area of critical public services, still running aged ICT solutions, that we find the most challenging of issues. NAO ICT Report

Private businesses may well have similar issues to face, but if a retailer were to be struck down and unable to trade, then that's a problem, yet potentially manageable. However, should a critical public service, from policing, to passports, to pensions and welfare payments, and far beyond, be struck down, then this is catastrophic at levels that could well be unmanageable. And of course, we are now in the very first chapter of all things AI and distributed cloud computing.... so whilst my comments here really focus on ICT systems of old, now that we are opening up and sharing across porous borders, there's a while new paradigm to be concerned with. But more of that another time.

I suppose what the Crowdstrike 'outage' showed us is that this all happens rather quickly and when it does it moves close to the speed of light. The Crowdstrike issue was surprisingly limited with around 19,000 servers affected worldwide, a mere drop in the server 'ocean', or 'cloud' if you prefer. What it showed is that you don't see this happening until it's too late, and in this instance, this wasn't some malign actor or adversarial nation state. So let's be thankful for that at the very least.

The solution therefore is hard to quantify, but what it does teach us is that when designing modern ICT solutions careful attention must be paid to the increasingly complex interconnected world of tech. And, it will only get ever more complex.

Be assured that another disaster will happen, it's unavoidable.

But when it does let's hope that the solution designers have done their due diligence, designed in full and sunny daylight, and have made appropriate plans to recover as quickly as is humanly possible to do so.

A final thought... In our ever increasingly geo-political world, friends matter and whether you keep your solutions 'in-country' or with allies that share your values, perhaps a little risk and recovery mapping would go a long way to help us sleep at night. We don't live in a bubble and it's impossible to protect against every eventuality. So let's accept the risk and collaborate with folks we trust, based upon shared values and a commercial reality of a 'win-win'.