The recent CrowdStrike outage sent ripples of disruption across the digital landscape, highlighting the fragility of even the most sophisticated systems. This incident serves as a stark reminder of the importance of robust IT practices. As described in a recent research note from Forrester, “From a business perspective, this event was an epic third-party technology risk management failure with cascading impact on operational, financial, and reputational risk.”
This should be a particularly salient moment for manufacturers and distributors that are not currently applying best practices in their approach to industrial code, leaving many vulnerabilities beyond those that surfaced with CrowdStrike.
Key Takeaways from the Crowdstrike Outage
- The Imperative of Change Management: The outage stemmed from a faulty update, emphasizing the critical need for rigorous change management processes. Industrial DevOps can fortify this aspect by automating testing and instituting rigorous governance over deployment, ensuring consistency and minimizing the risk of human error.
- Resilience and Redundancy: The Bedrock of Stability: The widespread impact of the outage underscored the necessity of resilience and redundancy in critical systems. Manufacturers and distributors can leverage industrial DevOps to build fault-tolerant architectures, implement failover mechanisms, and fortify business continuity against disruptions.
- Observability and Monitoring: The Early Warning System: The incident revealed the need for enhanced observability and monitoring to enable swift detection and resolution of issues. Industrial DevOps can empower organizations to implement comprehensive monitoring solutions and achieve real-time visibility into system health, performance, and security.
- Communication and Transparency: The Glue that Holds it Together: Effective communication is paramount during an outage. Industrial DevOps fosters seamless collaboration between development, operations, and security teams, facilitating agile incident response and transparent communication with stakeholders.
Industrial DevOps: A Proactive Defense
Industrial DevOps offers a suite of tools and practices that can help manufacturers and distributors avoid a Crowdstrike-like fate. Industrial DevOps delivers unparalleled visibility and control of industrial automation code across multi-vendor devices for continuous quality control, streamlined production, and preemptive crisis management. This translates to benefits such as preventing costly downtime, expediting disaster recovery, gaining governance and control, and optimizing operations.
Conclusion
The Crowdstrike outage serves as a cautionary tale, underscoring the importance of preparedness in an increasingly digital world. By embracing Industrial DevOps practices and technologies, manufacturers and distributors can enhance their agility, resilience, and security. This proactive approach minimizes the risk of outages, ensures smooth operations even amidst unexpected challenges, and ultimately safeguards your bottom line.
If you’d like to learn more about Forrester’s key takeaways from the CrowdStrike disaster, we are providing complimentary access to the report now for a limited time: