NETSCOUT comments on worldwide IT outage

Author: Simon Rowley

At the end of last week, news emerged that airlines, media, banks, hospitals and many other enterprises were all dealing with major IT outages. The ramifications and fallout from this outage are still continuing, with flights being cancelled around the world, hospitals postponing non-urgent surgeries, and shops being unable to accept card payments.

The mass IT outage is believed to have been caused by a faulty software update. In turn, this is impacting Microsoft software, knocking affected PCs and servers offline.

Eileen Haggerty, AVP Product & Solutions at NETSCOUT, comments on the chaos the outage has caused for enterprises and organisations across industries, as well as the importance of maintaining and securing networks to avoid similar outages in the future:

“The IT outage currently affecting a wide selection of organisations including airlines, media and banks appears to have been caused by a faulty software update. Hospitals and healthcare treatment providers have also been affected with several major hospitals cancelling non-urgent surgeries and others announcing they can still accept appointments but cannot currently connect to patient records, instead having to rely on paper records.

“Implementing system updates effectively requires carrying out preventive maintenance and routine upgrades to ensure services can operate at optimal efficiency. By carrying out maintenance checks and regular updates, organisations can mitigate the risk of unexpected downtime and, in turn, prevent fiscal and reputational losses. To avoid downtime resulting from system outages, as well as the chaos and performance disruption that accompanies it, organisations’ IT teams need complete end-to-end visibility into the threats against their network. This allows organisations to monitor networks and applications regardless of where they are hosted or where users access them.

“Additionally, to fully understand and secure an organisation’s network, IT teams should conduct proactive synthetic tests, ensuring application functionality and simulating real user traffic respectively. These tests help measure the quality of the user experience and get ahead of performance issues before users themselves encounter negative impacts.

“Looking ahead, as a way of learning from today’s global IT outage, organisations should use visibility tools for post-mortem, allowing them to build a detailed repository of information based on previous issues they have encountered, helping them to deal with future challenges more effectively and efficiently.”

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