On 19th July 2024, services and industries around the world ground to a halt. The cause? A faulty automated security update. While widely known by security experts, the sheer impact of such an update was made painfully clear to the average person, affecting countless businesses and organisations in every sector. With airlines to healthcare, and financial services to government being affected, the impacts on people were felt far and wide – with banking apps out of action and hospitals having to cancel non-urgent surgeries.

Yet a year on from the global IT outage, have businesses really learned anything? Recent outages for banks and major service providers would suggest otherwise. Although not every outage can be avoided, there are a few key things businesses should remember. Eileen Haggerty area vice president, product & solutions at NETSCOUT, gives her biggest takeaways from the outage and how organisations can avoid the same happening again:

“If nothing else, businesses should ensure they have the visibility they need to pre-empt issues stemming from software updates. Realistically, they need complete, round-the-clock monitoring of their networks and entire IT environment. With this visibility, and by carrying out maintenance checks and regular updates, organisations can mitigate the risk of unexpected downtime and, in turn, prevent financial and reputational losses.

“Securing a network and assuring consistent performance isn't just about deploying defences; it's about anticipating every move. That's why a best practice for IT teams could include conducting proactive synthetic tests which simulate real traffic, long before a single customer encounters a frustrating lag or a critical function fails. Conducting these tests provides organisations with the vital foresight they need to anticipate issues before they even have a chance to materialise. This step, combined with proactive real-time traffic monitoring provides vital details necessary when facing a security incident, major industry outage, or a local corporate issue, enabling the appropriate response with evidence as fast as possible.

“While outages like last year’s are a harsh lesson for businesses, they also present an invaluable learning opportunity. Truly resilient organisations will turn the disruption they experienced into a powerful data source and a blueprint for performance assurance and cyber resilience. This means leveraging advanced visibility tools to conduct deeply informative post-mortems. By building a rich, detailed repository of information from every previous incident, organisations aren’t just documenting history; establishing best practice policies; they're actively future-proofing their operations, ensuring they can anticipate and navigate any potential challenges – before they become an issue for customers.”