22 Jul The day the IT held the Earth Still
Crowdstrike: The day the IT
First: WINNER from my last newsletter for the Amazon Gift Card was Ariana w/ Atlas Investment Management & Retirement Solutions! Ariana responded to my newsletter in what seemed like a tenth of a second! Congrats!
July 19th: The CrowdStrike flawed patch that took the Earth to a grinding halt
Did you notice anything unusual on Friday, July 19th even through the weekend?
Personally, I noticed Amazon packages showed up late. FedEx deliveries were delayed. Weird things were happening all over the place. Payment processors were “broken”… It was like the moon-earth connection myths were all coming to fruition.
CrowdStrike, is one of the, if not the most globally recognized leading company of “I.T. awesomeness” … an all-in-one platform called CrowdStrike Falcon Complete that essentially replaces **nearly** every I.T. defense tool needed…
This software offers Endpoint Security; Exposure Management; Identify Threat Detection & Response; IT Automation; Threat Intelligence & Hunting; Cloud Security; Next-Gen SIEM; Generative AI; Data Protection; Workflow Automation… All under their flagship product.
This company WAS so “SO HOT” that its stock price was hovering near $400/share.
We actually have been looking at them for over a year and considering them as our solution of choice on behalf of our clients… But the barrier to entry is SO EXPENSIVE… $98,400 per customer MSRP per year. So, if we have 70 clients we do I.T. support for, that would be $98,400×70 (in other words, they are too good for us).
Their product also has remediation of all security issues – so when an issue is found, their NOC (network operation center) which employs hundreds of engineers logs into the affected computers on behalf of the company’s I.T. department and remediates the issues.
Time Magazine: 298 of the Fortune 500 companies including banks, energy companies, healthcare companies, and food companies use CrowdStrike!!
What Happened?
On Thursday evening, July 18th, CrowdStrike rolled out a typical patch/update.
As it turns out, this update had a bug. This bug crashed every Windows computer and Server globally running the software causing the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).
The recovery/remediation/repair process is NOT automated. It is all hands-on.
Rest Assured – none of our clients were impacted (except co-managed clients whose owner VC/PE groups have deployed CrowdStrike to all their companies).
The benefits of non-unified layered protection:
We have a multi-layered approach using a handful of vendors to perform the same feature set that CrowdStrike essentially does. On top of that, we are our own NOC and we are performing remediation DAILY for all our clients.
We have looked into and often desired to move to an all-in-one platform like CrowdStrike. And, honestly, nobody compares to CrowdStrike which provides an all-in-one set of services listed above. NOBODY.
Well, thank you CrowdStrike for making us look good 🙂
With that said… This is a harsh reality in the I.T. world. We all depend on the internet, security, and uptime. This is a rude awakening to the I.T. space and how quickly things can be flipped upside down – even for Fortune 500 companies with hundreds of I.T. Engineers on staff.
SOS|Support here to help
If you have any colleagues, friends, or associates at any company that was affected by the CrowdStrike outage – reach out to us @ itdonebetter@sossupport.net or 801-563-9700. We are here to help be boots on the ground. Microsoft has issued a fix and we had experience starting Friday to fix affected computers.
The Future of CrowdStrike:
Although they are getting plummeted in social media, X/Twitter, and the internet – I believe CrowdStrike will come roaring back stronger than ever in the coming months and years. I have no hesitation in recommending CrowdStrike to any enterprise (and yes, we can even resell it… for only $98,400/year).
I’m not a financial advisor, but now COULD be a great time to buy some stock in a company that either MUST rebuild stronger than ever, or it will crumble and fail. I believe the former to be the case. Time will tell.
Crowdstrike stock has dropped 30% in 5 days:
Mailing Address Change:
Please send all mail correspondence to the following address and no longer to the Draper PO Box.
SOS Support
1098 W South Jordan Pkwy #106
South Jordan, UT 84095
——————————————-
For the latest cyber-attacks reports, follow these links:
https://www.cisa.gov/uscert/ncas/current-activity
https://www.csis.org/programs/strategic-technologies-program/significant-cyber-incidents
Thanks,
Jason
——————-
