Outage Bootcamp: How Resilient Is IT Infrastructure in 2024?

From CrowdStrike’s infamous bad update to cloud, network, and service failures, IT took its share of hits this year. How does it hold up going into the final quarter?

Joao-Pierre S. Ruth, Senior Editor

September 23, 2024

Unexpected, significant downtimes struck the IT landscape across 2024, with incidents that forced at least one major airline to halt operations for several days or saw cloud traffic to slow or grind to a halt briefly.

Repercussions from the CrowdStrike outage might be sorted out in court, with hundreds of millions of dollars potentially at stake. Other, shorter-term outages included hiccups in cloud and software services at Salesforce, Atlassian, and AT&T.

As the year stands at the threshold of its last three months, how does IT infrastructure hold up? Are systems and services as resilient as they should be? Given the volume of data and software that circulates around the world, is the global IT infrastructure mostly reliable? How bad could outages become in worst-case scenarios?

This episode of DOS Won’t Hunt brought together Thomas Phelps, (upper right in video) CIO and senior vice-president of corporate strategy with Laserfiche; Stephanie Aceves, (lower left) senior director of product management, incident response with Tanium; Alex Hoff, (upper left) co-founder of Auvik; and James Doggett, (lower middle) CISO of Semperis. They discussed typical culprits behind outages, the inevitability of outages, and what else organizations might do to boost their recovery plans -- just in case.

Related:CrowdStrike Aftermath: Lessons Learned for Future Recovery

Listen to the full podcast here.

About the Author

Joao-Pierre S. Ruth

Senior Editor

Joao-Pierre S. Ruth covers tech policy, including ethics, privacy, legislation, and risk; fintech; code strategy; and cloud & edge computing for InformationWeek. He has been a journalist for more than 25 years, reporting on business and technology first in New Jersey, then covering the New York tech startup community, and later as a freelancer for such outlets as TheStreet, Investopedia, and Street Fight. Follow him on Twitter: @jpruth.


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