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July’s global outage caught most Australian executives off guard, and most think the next one is inevitable.
A new survey has revealed the majority of Australian executives, alongside their international counterparts, are expecting another global incident on the scale of July’s CrowdStrike outage in the next 12 months.
According to a survey of 1,000 executive-level leaders from Australia, the US, the UK, and Japan, 88 per cent of Australian respondents believe it’s a matter of ‘when’ another outage occurs, not ‘if’.
The survey – conducted by Wakefield Research on behalf of digital operations firm PagerDuty – also found that 77 per cent of Australian executives were caught off guard by the outage and that there were gaps in their business’ level of preparedness that were exposed by the incident.
90 per cent agreed that they were prioritising security over readiness, and 48 per cent said that limited access to real-time data actively hindered their businesses during the incident.
Globally, 37 per cent of executives said their businesses lost revenue during the outage, and 39 per cent experienced delayed customer response times. 44 per cent were forced to rely on manual processes during the incident, while 38 per cent experienced a breakdown of internal communications between departments.
“The PagerDuty study shows that executives around the globe are shifting their leadership priorities with major incidents in mind, with 100 per cent of those surveyed reporting a heightened focus on preparing for future service disruptions at their companies,” Eric Johnson, chief information officer at PagerDuty, said in a statement.
“CEOs and their boards are now focused on this issue, and with the accelerated pace of AI and other advanced technologies being deployed, companies cannot afford to delay critical technology infrastructure updates.”
The 19 July IT outage was the result of a faulty software update issued by cyber security company CrowdStrike, which resulted in outages on Microsoft systems and devices across the globe.
The issue stunted the operations of many industries, including healthcare, critical infrastructure, banks, government services, and airlines. Many airlines were forced to issue paper boarding passes, and some flight services were grounded.
While a fix was issued within hours, the issues continued to affect organisations for much longer, as many devices needed to be updated manually.
David Hollingworth has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has worked for a range of print and online titles in his career. He is enjoying getting to grips with cyber security, especially when it lets him talk about Lego.
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