The CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. outage caused huge ripples worldwide, with 96% of customers reporting that they saw an impact, leaving many companies scrambling for disaster recovery solutions.
As a provider of information technology and security software, Kaseya Inc. was on the ground, helping customers repair their network and get their endpoint devices back up and running. The CrowdStrike outage may have taken everyone by surprise, but it will not be the first time an outage happens on this scale, according to Ranjan Singh (pictured), chief product officer of Kaseya.
“It behooves us that we take every step and measure to ensure that defects and bugs like this don’t materialize in the field. I also believe it’s a question of when, not if,” he said. “Software is far from perfect. Making sure that we have tools and support processes and internal procedures ready, whether it impacts us directly or impacts our partners, so we are ready to support them no matter what, and to be able to ensure and run through scenarios … that we can do this at scale.”
Singh spoke with Christophe Bertrand, principal analyst for theCUBE Research, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed what the CrowdStrike incident means for the future of IT and security and how to prepare for future software outages.
Preparing disaster recovery plans in CrowdStrike’s wake
The CrowdStrike outage will continue to linger in the mind of its customers, with 40% reporting a very significant impact on their software and 6% reporting an extremely significant impact. One of the trickiest parts of the crisis was that most potential solutions required being next to the physical endpoint, Singh mentioned. At the time of the outage, Kaseya was responding to its partners with a three-pronged solution.
“First and foremost, we simply put out a bulletin that it doesn’t matter whether our partners were running our solutions or not. We are here to help. We sent out a bulletin and they can call in,” Singh said. “Our support organization was ready and armed to help them in any capacity, whether it’s as simple as executing the steps that were outlined or because we are a premium provider of disaster recovery solutions. If they had been impacted, we could potentially help them in that regard as well.”
Kaseya’s teams also worked on a script that would enable customers to reboot their end devices with a USB stick, and lastly, the company prepared multiple disaster recovery solutions. During this stressful time, Kaseya helped its partners by applying the solution that was the best fit.
“I was on a Teams chat with one of our partners and he had been up all night. His customer base includes architecture firms and such, so, he needed to get their servers on premise because they host a lot of line of business applications, as well as some remote endpoints,” Singh said. “We have solutions … that manage the BitLocker keys. So, we were working with him directly, how we can automate some of the scripting, some of the reading of the BitLocker keys.”
Even though the CrowdStrike incident was upsetting for many customers, Singh suggests that it keeps the attention on cybersecurity. Ironically, the outage would likely not have been as widespread if people were not trying to keep their systems secure.
“If there is a silver lining or a positive aspect here, it’s that it’s become evident that security is more mainstream and security is being taken seriously, and that is why the CrowdStrike solution was present on so many endpoints,” he said.
Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview: