Eileen Haggerty, area vice president of product and solutions at NETSCOUT, comments on yesterday’s incident, and how organisations can prepare for and respond to major service disruptions:
“Disruptions can and do happen to all types of organisations, including the world’s best providers, with the best technology, and systems designed and architected to state-of-the-art levels. While today’s level of hyper-connectivity brings huge benefits, it also means that when disruptions happen across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure, the effects can be far-reaching.
“In the wake of a major network outage, organisations may pause, take stock of the business impact, and evaluate their own networks to determine how they can prevent, avoid, or rapidly respond to a similar situation. Companies cannot stop service disruptions in third-party environments, but they can build digital resilience into their own operations, workflows and incident response processes.
“Outages in recent years have highlighted the need for incident readiness processes that, much like fire drills, require regular practice, rehearsal and refinement. True observability – driven by packet-derived evidence and high-fidelity telemetry – is essential to building operational resilience because it helps teams understand not just what is broken, but why and where. Providing this AI-ready data, which delivers essential operational context, shortens mean time to knowledge (MTTK), helping organisations verify service behaviour across complex environments, determine exactly who to call, and establish clear expectations from vendors to limit the business impact of outages.”
ORIGINAL SOFTWARE
This comment is provided by Carl Andrews, CEO of Original Software, responding to the Google outage that has affected businesses across the UK.
“The recent Google Cloud outage highlights just how interconnected business systems have become. While Google continues to investigate the root cause of the issue, the immediate impact on banking, retail and other critical sectors shows how a single disruption can quickly escalate and create a domino effect.
For the vast majority of businesses, although the initial problem might be out of their hands, that doesn’t mean they can’t be proactive and prepare for such risks. Often, the real challenge occurs when systems start to come back online, as teams may run into data synchronisation problems, failed API integrations and other technical issues that may have gone unnoticed before systems went down.
Software testing has traditionally been thought of as a separate responsibility for IT teams and developers to manage. However, with almost all businesses dependent on some form of digital system for daily operations, even a few hours of downtime can result in significant financial losses. Therefore, how quickly teams are able to validate and restore essential systems is what ultimately protects end users.
Unexpected outages are inevitable, whether it’s caused by a power event like this, a software bug elsewhere or a breach somewhere else in the supply chain. Until businesses stop assuming uptime and focus on end-to-end process testing, they will continue to find themselves running into secondary issues while everyone else resumes normal business operations.”
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