IT Outage: My $2 Cents Worth of Advice
Impact of the CrowdStrike Update
The recent disruption caused by the CrowdStrike update has sent shockwaves through businesses and governments, highlighting just how vulnerable we are in the digital age. Rather than pointing fingers, it’s essential to focus on how we can come out of this stronger and more resilient.
Our lives are so integrated into the digital world that any failure, whether a deliberate cyberattack or an innocent mistake, can paralyze us. Moreover, this incident opened the door for hackers to exploit the situation through scams and phishing. In my opinion, the outcome of this event — and others to come — is a significant loss of trust in digital support.
What became clear last week is that we can no longer rely on such fragile systems. The notion of using manual backups to prevent societal collapse is absurd. Can we seriously entertain the idea of reverting to an analog version of our lives?
We need to rethink the landscape and explore options for structuring the robustness of the software and hardware markets. The current concentration in the cloud and cybersecurity sectors can create single points of failure that could have serious consequences. Exploring alternatives and diversifying infrastructure could help mitigate these risks.
As a first step to getting back on track, we need to keep critical processes for social infrastructure running smoothly even during cyber incidents. The main idea is to mix things up: use different cybersecurity providers, operating systems, and cloud services. Having backup systems offline and doing updates in stages are also good moves.
However, the question that intrigues me most is how to regain trust in digital systems after such an incident. Digital security is not just an issue for corporations, states, or their coordinated efforts. It’s a social problem. It involves understanding everyone’s role in the system and transitioning from seeing ourselves merely as users or consumers to recognizing that we’re all digital citizens.
The solution cannot come solely from institutions and corporations; we’ve seen that it’s not enough. It requires a collective commitment: just as we see ourselves as citizens of our cities, we need to start seeing ourselves as digital citizens of our shared digital reality. This shift in perspective demands adopting robust and responsible social behavior in the digital realm.
It’s time to accept that the digital world is our life, and our life is now digital.
Adrian Sicilia
#CrowdStrike #ITOutage #DigitalCitizenship
