BSOD = Bad Day at the Office
There was only one story in IT last week, and it was the ongoing saga of CrowdStrike's failure and the disruption it caused. Our rolling coverage of the CrowdStrike issue gets into the weeds of the situation, but time is money and many of you asked Smart Answers for a concise summary: just what exactly did happen with CrowdStrike?
Smart Answers parsed a simple answer from the many thousands of words our expert editors wrote, explaining in simple terms what happened, and estimating insured losses to run to $1 billion or higher. Thatâs a bad day at the office for anyone, but especially for CrowdStrikeâs senior leaders and the CIOs of organizations who rely of CrowdStrikeâs products.
Find out: What happened with CrowdStrike?
What Does CrowdStrike Failure Teach CIOs?
The story that hit hardest with the CIO audience concerned the impact of CrowdStrike's failure on cloud strategies. Post CrowdStrike, CIOs are looking at ways to avoid single points of failure and are re-evaluating their cloud strategies to prevent any 'blue screen of death' incidents, and this prompted readers to ask Smart Answers how they should rethink, reassess, move forward.
The Smart Answers view, informed by the wisdom of crowds, is that diversity is a super strength. Mitigate risks through multiple providers, control your private data through hybrid cloud. There are downsides to such an approach, in terms of cost and complexity. But really, who can afford to avoid the risks?
Find out What are the benefits of adopting a diversified approach to cloud strategies?
To Test is Best: What About the Rest?
What lessons will cloud vendors take from CrowdStrike's failure? How can we (and they) ensure it never happens again? CrowdStrike has publicly blamed a hole in its testing software for the defective content update release that hobbled millions of Windows computers worldwide.
It said that the flaw was in a type of update it calls Rapid Response Content, which goes through less-rigorous checks than other updates. From now on CrowdStrike updates will be tested locally before being sent to clients. Content update and rollback testing will be carried out and thereâll be additional stability and content interface testing. CrowdStrike will introduce a staggered deployment strategy for Rapid Response Content so that any issues will impact only a tiny portion of customers.
This answers for CrowdStrike the question our CSOs have been asking about how vendors will change their behaviors post CrowdStrike. But how about the others?
Find out: Will cloud software vendors change their testing processes after the CrowdStrike incident?
About Smart Answers
Smart Answers is an AI-based chatbot tool designed to help you discover content, answer questions, and go deep on the topics that matter to you. Each week we send you the three most popular questions asked by our readers, and the answers Smart Answers provides.
Developed in partnership with Miso.ai, Smart Answers draws only on editorial content from our network of trusted media brandsâCIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network Worldâand was trained on questions that a savvy enterprise IT audience would ask. The result is a fast, efficient way for you to get more value from our content.
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