The CrowdStrike Update Incident: Readying for the Next Black Swan Event>
Everest Group Blog – Kumar Avijit
In a recent incident, a faulty update from CrowdStrike caused global chaos, grounding flights, disrupting hospitals, and halting banking services
The update, pushed on July 19, 2024, at 4:09 UTC, made Windows devices crash, affecting around 8.5 million devices globally
The remediation was provided within 78 minutes, but the impact was severe
Major impacts were felt across airlines, healthcare, and banks
Thousands of flights were canceled, hospitals had to activate backup systems, and multiple banks saw disruption in services
This incident highlights the challenges enterprises face in managing such incidents, including lack of agility, complex infrastructure, gigantic scale, and limited asset visibility
To address these challenges, enterprises must prioritize building business resilience, which includes cyber resilience and operational resilience
The internally developed 5R framework (Ready, Respond, Recover, Reinforce, and Revamp) can help enterprises remain cyber resilient in the face of black swan events
Key actions for enterprises include:
1) Emphasizing innovation in business resilience
2) Focusing on cyber resilience
3) Enhancing operational resilience
4) Fostering strategic collaboration
5) Establishing Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) on business resilience
Enterprises should strategically partner with service providers to establish business resilience
Key recommendations include:
1) Enhanced protection strategies
2) Frequent data back-ups and recovery services
3) Better asset visibility
4) Robust supply chain through sandboxing
5) Training employees on business resilience
The CrowdStrike update incident underscores the vital need for robust business resilience
Enterprises should invest in innovative resilience strategies, enhance cybersecurity measures, and collaborate with service providers to ensure continuous operations and safeguard their assets.
Link: https://www.everestgrp.com/it-services/the-crowdstrike-update-incident-readying-for-the-next-black-swan-event-blog.html