Tech bytes for tea?

The CrowdStrike outage was a vivid reminder of how interconnected the world’s systems are – and how dramatically every organisation can be affected. In the aftermath of the outage, Bla Sweeney at Keysight Technologies shares how every C-suite needs to be asking: how do we mitigate the risk of systemic software failure in our organisation?

Four suggestions that provide food for thought as we pursue the quest of building resilience into our systems, and minimising risks at both the systemic and organisational levels.

Before answering, let’s look at how and why we became so reliant on third party software.

The original software development lifecycle

Not too many years ago, the software development lifecycle (SDLC) took months, if not years.

Software was installed on-premise. We would only deploy it after extensive and exhaustive testing. Each time we wanted to upgrade the software to a newer, stable release, we’d go through the same process again. Some organizations did this each year. Many more waited several years because the investment in time and money was too much to consider on an annual basis.

The process was incredibly costly and inefficient. On the other hand, we were in control of our own destinies when something went wrong.

What changed?

Every company is a tech company

Well, everything changed.

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