There’s both good news and bad news in the recent CrowdStrike outage still wreaking havoc across the world. The bad news is apparent, if not in the CRWD share price, then certainly in the interruptions to business and society still reverberating a week after that disastrous update. The good news? Those organisations with effective disaster recovery plans incorporating sound backup and restore policies have returned to normalcy with relatively minimal interruption to their operations.

Regrettable but inevitable

While it is easy to blame CrowdStrike for the outage (and of course, it was the security company’s botched update behind the ‘blue screen of death’ plague), it’s worth taking a bigger picture view of the situation. 

What this essentially means is that an outage of this nature is inevitable. In this case, it was caused by a ‘minor’ programming error (there’s a detailed and clear explanation of what happened available at TechTarget). 

And while generally described as unprecedented in scale, with some calling it ‘Y2K but 24 years late’, the outage isn’t unprecedented in nature. 

By that, we mean things like this have happened before, and will happen again.

Getting your business prepared

The Crowdstrike outage is a stark reminder of the importance of backup and disaster recovery for any organisation that relies on cloud services and data for its core functions. Backup and disaster recovery are essential processes that ensure the availability, integrity, and security of data and systems in the event of a disaster, such as a cyberattack, a natural disaster, a human error, or a hardware failure. Backup and disaster recovery can help organisations minimise the impact of an outage, reduce the downtime and data loss, and restore the normal operations as quickly as possible. In this blog post, we will discuss the benefits of backup and disaster recovery, the best practices for implementing them, and the tools and solutions that can help you achieve them.

Benefits of Backup and Disaster Recovery

• Backup and disaster recovery can provide several benefits for organisations of any size and industry, such as: 

• Protecting data and systems from malicious attacks, such as ransomware, malware, phishing, and denial-of-service. 

• Preserving data and systems from accidental or intentional deletion, modification, or corruption. 

• Ensuring data and systems compliance with regulatory and legal requirements, such as GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001. 

• Enhancing data and systems availability and accessibility for users, customers, and partners. 

What the CrowdStrike outage has shown without question, then, is that recovery plans should encompass the capability to address software update issues. This should include the sort of automated rollback which is – or should be – standard practice in a sound DR strategy and process. 

And – the more granular that rollback capability, the better. Recommendations include separating application data from operating systems, because, again as evident from the CrowdStrike outage, the issue was OS-related. 

We’ll be the first to admit how easy it is to say ‘I told you so’ with the benefit of hindsight. We’ll also be the first to say, ‘Don’t crucify CrowdStrike’, because scale of outage aside, they weren’t the first, and they won’t be the last. 

That said, it is always worth taking lessons from any and every disaster. In this case, we must balance the necessity for regular and automated updates to security software. In that balance, new precautions built into DR systems are clearly highly advisable and should become a part of your business continuity plan.