The software and its services bundle works on service level agreements, SLAs, which generally promise an uptime generally as near to 100% as possible. Suffice to say that the intention and purpose is to provide a seamless service to the business enterprise, which in turn is able to provide an uninterrupted service, to the final customers. As all of us accept that most of the time it happens in the desired manner and once in a while if it is broken,as the past experience shows, it has been for the reason of a breach or hack.
There is a one in a million chance that there can be other reasons outside of the threat actors ecosystem. One such glaring example is the Microsoft Outage on July 19, 2024 caused by a faulty update of CrowdStrike. It led to widespread system crashes, particularly affecting Microsoft Windows environments. Now at a much smaller scale but of the same genre we find an incident news titled, “Oracle engineers caused dayslong software outage at US hospitals.” This time it is the Oracle engineers who landed around 45 hospitals in the US in this crisis.
Oracle engineers mistakenly triggered a five-day software outage at Community Health System Hospitals. It was a total collapse causing the facilities to return to paper-based patient records. The outage involves Oracle Health, Oracle’s electronic health record (EHR) system, affecting “several” hospitals, leading them to activate “downtime procedures.” But how did it happen? It happened on April 23, after engineers conducting maintenance work mistakenly deleted critical storage connected to a key database. Finally, the outage was resolved two days back. The company clarified the incident was not related to a cyber attack or other security incident.
While the IT guys did what they did, the expected resilience did not come from them. The spokesperson said that the hospitals were able to maintain services without material impact. To quote, “We are proud of our clinical and support teams who worked through the multi-day outage with professionalism and a commitment to delivering high quality, safe care for patients.” The impacted hospitals are working hard to re-establish full functionality and return to normal procedures and procedures. Now that it is established that EHR is a crucial software within the US healthcare system and outages can cause serious disruptions to patient care.
INBUILT RESILIENCE IS THE KEY; REDUNDANT SYSTEMS SHOULD BE CREATED FOR SEAMLESS TRANSITIONING OF OPERATIONS.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.