Microsoft’s recent outages caused by a DDoS attack and a software update have left many of its customers questioning the reliability of its services. The outages, which occurred less than two weeks apart, have raised concerns about what happens when a company with massive market share cannot provide its services and how customers should think about the future.

According to InformationWeek, the DDoS attack disrupted several of Microsoft’s Azure cloud services on July 30, causing intermittent connection errors, timeouts, or latency spikes for nearly eight hours. The CrowdStrike incident, which occurred on July 19, triggered a mid-July outage that impacted millions of Windows devices around the world. The incident caused critical services to struggle or cease entirely to function, leading to legal battles between CrowdStrike, Microsoft, and Delta.

These two incidents suggest a need for a closer look at the review process. Insurance executives who rely on services such as Microsoft’s to operate their businesses have tough questions to answer about how they can take proactive steps forward knowing that these types of IT outages will almost certainly happen again, whether via a different root cause or with another major IT provider.

“It’s a wakeup call for people to think about how we can build resilience into the security and the IT infrastructure,” says Aimei Wei, founder and CTO of cybersecurity company Stellar Cyber. David Allen, CTO and CISO of Prevalent, urges enterprises to have disaster recovery plans in place and test them. “What would happen if this vendor went offline for 10 hours? What would happen if they went offline for a week, two weeks, a month? What are our alternatives? What can we set up in place to make sure our business isn’t impacted?” he asks.

At Riskwolf, we understand the importance of building resilience into the security and IT infrastructure of insurance companies. With our unique real-time data and dynamic risk modeling, we enable insurers to build and operate parametric insurance at scale. Our platform turns real-time data into insurance, providing simple, reliable, and fast solutions for insurance executives.

The recent outages caused by Microsoft’s DDoS attack and software update serve as a reminder that IT outages will happen again. Insurance executives must take proactive steps to build resilience into their security and IT infrastructure to ensure their businesses are not impacted. With Riskwolf, insurance executives can develop parametric insurance solutions that provide simple, reliable, and fast protection against IT outages.

Source: InformationWeek