And you thought the global IT outage in July was bad. A vast majority of executives expect something worse in 2025.
A digital doomsday scenario surpassing the CrowdStrike Inc. episode in July that left major pockets of the economy tattered is “not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when,'” according to a poll of 1,000 IT and business leaders released Thursday by PagerDuty Inc., a leader in digital operations management.
The tightly interconnected world is acutely susceptible to outages that can be caused by everything from cyberattacks to human error, warn executives.
Nearly nine in 10 (86%) admitted they have been prioritizing security at the expense of readiness for service disruptions. Some 83% said the July outage caught them off guard, exposing gaps in their preparedness for service disruptions. Even more troubling, nearly half (47%) believe insufficient incident-management planning will exacerbate the impact of major IT outages on their organizations.
“The PagerDuty study shows that executives around the globe are shifting their leadership priorities with major incidents in mind, with 100% 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,” Johnson added.
More than half the executives (55%) observed a shift in mindset toward continually evaluating and improving preparedness instead of a one-time move into investments in new systems or protocols that are now complete (45%).
Indeed, organizations that experienced multiple service outages because of the botched CrowdStrike software update said they suffered communication breakdowns between departments (38%), delays in workflow and projects put on hold (35%).
For many who experienced disruptions during service incidents, July’s outage has meant a return to the old ways of doing things. Some 44% of those polled increased reliance on manual processes or workarounds following the incident, showing how many organizations rely on digital tools.
For CrowdStrike, which adroitly handled fall-out from the incident and whose stock and revenue have remained strong as a result, being vigilant goes beyond software updates and revamped security procedures.
“Attackers are increasingly moving laterally between cloud platforms and on-prem environments to evade detection, leading to a 75% increase in cloud intrusions over the past year,” Elia Zaitsev, chief technology officer at CrowdStrike, said in an email. “This has put a premium on a holistic security platform that integrates runtime, posture management, identity and data security across hybrid environments.”
