Strengthening resilience: Considerations for Australian business following the largest global outage in history

On Friday, 19 July 2024, worldwide infrastructure crumbled in what is now recognised as the largest outage the global economy has ever seen. A critical error in CrowdStrike Falcon led to a widespread outage affecting organisations relying on their endpoint protection services. The error was introduced during a routine software update, which inadvertently triggered a malfunction in the security platform's functionality.

The impact of the outage was severe. It affected a significant number of enterprises worldwide, causing disruptions in their security monitoring and endpoint protection. Many organisations experienced downtime, affecting their daily operations and cybersecurity posture. CrowdStrike quickly identified the issue and began working on a fix. They communicated with affected customers and provided workaround solutions. A subsequent update was rolled out to rectify the error, restoring the normal functioning of the Falcon platform.

While PKF continues to assess the full impact of this outage, there are three key strategies that every Australian business should consider to build resilience at this time.

Three key considerations for establishing and building resilience

1. Complete a comprehensive risk assessment

• Know your dependencies by identifying and assessing your critical third-party suppliers. Understand the potential risks each poses in case of an outage. Where is your single point of failure? 
• Conduct an impact assessment to determine how outages in third party services could affect your business operations. Prioritise high-impact vendors for more stringent oversight.

2. Prepare your incident response plan

• Have a well-defined incident response plan that is communicated clearly, enhances your business's preparedness, and allows for quick identification and resolution of issues.
• Establish clear communication with third party vendors. Ensure timely and transparent updates about their system statuses and outages.

3. Back up your essential data

• Regular backups of critical data guarantees that vital information remains accessible, even if primary systems fail during an outage.
• Maintaining up-to-date backups protects against data loss, allowing for swift recovery and continuity of operations following any disruption. 

PKF is well positioned to help you and your business with understanding your incident response and third-party risk through our comprehensive advisory services. Contact us today for assistance.