Today, every sector across the globe heavily relies on cybersecurity. That is why the recent outage of the global Cybersecurity leader, CrowdStrike, sent shockwaves across the planet. The outage unmasked the true fragility of the technological operation and exposed the future risks of similar situations.
Occurring in the early hours of July 19, 2024, the global outage had a massive impact on the functioning of vital organs, like governments, businesses, financial services, industries and other sectors. It was triggered by the software update of a US-based cybersecurity company, CrowdStrike. As a result, PCs running on Microsoft Windows crashed and were unable to reboot. All the users of Crowdstrike solutions were severely affected by this update.
The last few decades witnessed the streamlining of operations and minimization of inefficiencies in various sectors – acceleration of production, improved efficiency and optimized material management. There’s no doubt – Technology has revolutionised communication. However, this overdependence on technology has also exposed industries to outage, hacking and similar dangers. It is evident that our reliance on technology can be a double edged sword – while it can improve functioning, it is still susceptible to danger, as we have seen in the CrowdStrike incident.
The message from the Crowdstrike Outage was loud and clear: The organisation must prepare for all kinds of disruptions. Usage of parallel or different cybersecurity could be the solution to avoid similar contingencies. It is important to strengthen the response team within the organisation. Regular security audits and mock drills can be conducted to assess the company’s readiness to tackle similar outages.
In conclusion, the recent outage by Crowdstrike serves as a much-needed reminder of the vulnerabilities of a digital world. The incident highlights poor planning for the future, and the need for readiness for future challenges. This is key to staying in, and protecting, business.
https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Explaining-the-largest-IT-outage-in-history-and-whats-next
https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/topics/minimize-disruptions-crowdstrike-outage