The CrowdStrike incident cost organizations more than $5 billion this week. Discover how SAP LeanIX can empower you to mitigate outages rapidly.
A CrowdStrike update to Microsoft Windows systems caused worldwide chaos on July 19, 2024. The incident is being reported by outlets such as Sky News as the worst IT outage in history.
IT teams around the world were left fighting to get planes back in the air, hospitals back in operation, and TV stations back on-air. This is yet another example of the importance of SAP LeanIX as a tool for disaster mitigation.
By mapping your application portfolio, you can offer your organization instant clarity on the scale of the impact and plan your remediation efforts. This can be the difference between a close-call and total disaster for your organization.
To find out more about SAP LeanIX as a tool for disaster mitigation, book a demo:
What Caused The CrowdStrike Outage?
CrowdStrike Holdings Inc is a cyber security company based in the USA, which provides endpoint security, cyber attack response, and threat intelligence software. The company was founded in 2011, launching its Falcon antivirus software to market in 2013.
At 4:09am UTC on July 19, CrowdStrike released an update to its Falcon Sensor vulnerability scanner. The update contained a logic error requesting an out-of-bounds memory read leading to an invalid page fault, which caused enterprise Windows systems around the world to crash and become trapped in a bootloop.
CrowdStrike reverted the update at 5:27am, but devices booted before that time remained unusable. CrowdStrike deployed a fix at 9:45am, but it took far longer for systems to be rebooted, and even more time before normality could be restored.
The crash affected banks, healthcare services, and emergency call centers, grounded commercial airline flights, and led to broadcaster, Sky News, having to temporarily go off air. Reuters has since reported that the total financial loss to US Fortune 500 companies, excluding Microsoft, was over $5 billion alone.
The government of Malaysia has called for CrowdStrike and Microsoft to cover the country's financial losses, while CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz has been asked to testify before the US House of Representatives. Adam Leon Smith of the BCS Chartered Institute for IT, however, claimed we should be grateful the incident impacted Windows systems as, if it had affected Linux, "this could have been much worse".
Regardless of the global impact and the fallout for CrowdStrike, this week saw IT teams at companies around the world facing disaster head-on. The incident was just another example of how the key to disaster recovery is the ability to gain instant clarity on the impact of the outage.
Mitigating Disasters Like The Crowdstrike Outage
The CrowdStrike outage was unavoidable. CrowdStrike was a reputable security firm and none of their customers could have predicted the incident.
All IT teams could do was identify the threat quickly, confirm which systems were impacted, and mitigate the impact as much as possible. Outage monitoring dashboards will warn of the threat, but understanding the architecture of your IT landscape and how an outage will impact it is crucial.
Using SAP LeanIX, you can map and visualize your IT landscape, tag impacted systems, and prioritize your remediation efforts, all in dashboards and presentations that can be shared with anyone in your organization. This ensures that disaster mitigation is controlled, confident, and comprehensive.
Begin by creating fact sheets within SAP LeanIX for each of your organization's software applications. Filling these out will begin to track the connections between the applications, and the layout of your IT landscape within SAP LeanIX.
SAP LeanIX will guide you through the completion of your application map with our template Meta Model. Once complete, SAP LeanIX will then support you in tracking your applications against the business capabilities and processes they support.
This means that, in the case of the CrowdStrike incident, you could instantly track which of your business processes and capabilities the incident had disabled. You can then place all of this information in a dashboard and prioritize your remediation activities in a shareable format.
SAP LeanIX also has an integration with SAP Signavio, allowing for complete synchronization of your business process information with your application portfolio data. Together, SAP LeanIX and SAP Signavio will give you a complete picture of your dependencies and the impact of any outages.
Instantly Visualize The Impact
The key to dealing with incidents like the CrowdStrike update, is to achieve an instant, shared clarity on the impact. That kind of live oversight of your IT landscape can only be achieved by creating a visual map of it.
By tagging all the impacted systems, you can create a custom report and dashboard for those specific systems in minutes. You can also add a traffic light system to show your progress in remediating the issues or to illustrate the scale of the impact.
Using SAP LeanIX dashboards allows you to create a central hub for all the tools involved in your mitigation efforts. Combining all of this together, you'll be able to share a dynamic visual representation of the incident with all your stakeholders.
Being able to show the scale of the problem and your progress in fixing it to anyone in your organization empowers you to recruit the assistance you need with just a glance at your dashboard. This allows you to mobilize your entire organization into action.
Map Responsibility in SAP LeanIX
One of the key capabilities that SAP LeanIX has in dealing with issues like the CrowdStrike incident is its ability to map responsible people. With each application fact sheet clearly documenting the responsible person for that application, you have a ready made list of stakeholders you need to engage.
This will first assist with giving you a list of people to notify of the outage as it happens. Later, this will show you who you need to contact in order to initiate your remediation activity.
Manually compiling a list of stakeholders is a time-consuming process, particularly when you are on a deadline to rapidly respond to an incident. While it may seem like a minor benefit, this can be crucial for saving time when you need it the most.
Empowered with comprehensive, but easily consumable, information regarding the architecture of your application portfolio and IT landscape, you can cut the time it takes to mitigate the impact of incidents like the CrowdStrike outage. This could potentially save your organization millions.
Leverage The Power Of SAP LeanIX
Mitigating disasters like the CrowdStrike incident requires clear oversight of your application portfolio. That's exactly what SAP LeanIX offers.
By storing all your application data in the SAP LeanIX repository, you can create a single source of truth for your entire organization to work from. This makes gathering the information you need to mitigate disaster near instantaneous, allowing you to respond much faster.
Some disasters can't be avoided, but mitigating the impact rapidly can be the difference between a stressful week to put behind you and lasting damage to your organization. Leverage SAP LeanIX to make sure your business can weather any storm.
To find out more about how using SAP LeanIX as an information repository on your IT landscape can empower you to mitigate disaster, book a demo:
