Back to the future in business resilience post-CrowdStrike

IT Ops Query

SecOps, developers and infrastructure ops teams are often encouraged to work more closely together within IT, but for one industry analyst, the CrowdStrike outage exposed an even more significant gap between IT and businesses.

Charles Betz is vice president and principal analyst for enterprise architecture at Forrester Research. He has also worked as an adjunct professor at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, and as an enterprise architect at AT&T, Wells Fargo, Best Buy and Target. Following the CrowdStrike outage, Betz and a dozen other Forrester analysts collaborated on a report calling for a redefinition of enterprise resilience in the wake of the incident.

For Betz, the experience of Delta Airlines in the CrowdStrike aftermath is potentially instructive for improving business resilience.

"This was not a failure of IT disaster recovery," he said in this episode of Delta's weeklong ordeal. "This was truly a failure of business continuity…a shock to the physical system that couldn't be unwound without a lot of hard work."