While the impact of last week’s CrowdStrike outage is yet to be fully understood, it serves as an opportunity for C-suite and other business decision-makers to think through technology dependencies and the steps necessary to respond to this outage – as well as to mitigate related risks in future.
As a result of this, professional services firm Aon released their new insight and guidance as to how insurers can best utilise the lessons from this event to prepare for future calamities.
FinTech Global summarised the guidance below:
This CrowdStrike Outage is potentially one of the largest IT outages ever experienced by the global economy.
It has been linked to a security update from CrowdStrike’s Falcon software, which subsequently impacted Microsoft systems.
Based on public reporting to date, there is no evidence to suggest that this situation is the result of an external compromise.
There are several initial learnings businesses can take from the CrowdStrike outage. Firstly, businesses should evaluate, update, and test their business continuity and disaster recovery plans regularly.
Using risk analytics, companies should evaluate the financial impact of an event as part of this process.
Secondly, organisations should understand the dependencies and supply chain for critical infrastructure, ensuring they have adequate protection through contractual terms, insurance, or tested and resilient backup plans.
Thirdly, if a downtime event occurs, or there are concerns that an IT or security event has occurred, businesses should notify their insurance brokers and partners promptly to determine what coverage might be available.
Finally, businesses should review their regulatory reporting obligations in light of the incident.
The situation is still ongoing, but the IT outage serves as a reminder of the dynamic nature of technology and the importance of robust incident response protocols.
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