In the early hours of this Friday, July 19th, a cyber blackout disrupted a series of banking and communication services worldwide and also caused flight delays. The problem was caused by CrowdStrike, a company that provides digital security services. But how to understand this scenario and also how to protect oneself?
SecondReinaldo Boesso, technology expert and CEO of fintechTMB EducationCompany that operates with credit intelligence, it is necessary to initially understand that, in the current scenario, all systems of banks, airports, and large companies are in the cloud. "And who are the clouds responsible for housing most of these systems? They are two major American companies, one is Amazon with AWS, and the other is Microsoft with Azure. Together, they store global data and control virtually all systems," he explains.
According to Reinaldo Boesso, what happened was a technical problem with CrowdStrike. "This company had a problem and took down Microsoft's system, which in turn ended up taking down banks, airports, and applications that use it. In other words, it was a global impact, but it is already stabilizing," says the technology expert.
The CEO of TMB Educação emphasizes that the most used systems in the world tend to be very stable and rarely have any kind of problem, but they are naturally subject to risks. For him, the best way for companies to protect themselves against potential failures of one or the other is to choose redundancy, that is, to hire both.
"Some large banks even do something along these lines, but the issue is that hiring both generates an extremely high cost, since there is a doubled cost for systems, staff, software maintenance, and updates. With such a high cost, most choose one or the other alternative and not both," says Reinaldo Boesso.
The technology specialist says that, although the incident caused some inconveniences, Microsoft promptly worked to resolve the issue. Around 2 a.m., the company was already implementing a correction protocol. It is possible that, due to the complexity of some systems, some banks are still unstable because more time is needed to apply all the suggested changes. Still, I believe that throughout the day everything will be resolved, concludes Reinaldo Boesso.
