On Friday 19 July, millions of computers around the globe were impacted by the CrowdStrike incident. This involved a minor update to a relatively unknown piece of cybersecurity software brought businesses to a halt, grounded planes and disrupted telecoms. Whilst insured losses are not insignificant, the global insurance industry is likely to avoid any major financial impact. However, the incident should also give insurers pause for thought about their own systems resilience and business continuity planning. Read on to find out more about how Jade is helping the Australian insurance industry to anticipate, prepare for and recover from these risks.
With modern highly connected ecosystems of products and services, even a short outage can have serious consequences for a company’s customers, partners and brand. Business resilience is a complex topic, and each company will need to build their own strategy based on an analysis of their specific services, systems and threats. The different perspectives are too diverse to cover fully in a short article, but what follows are some of the common opportunities that we see for strengthening resilience.
When something does go wrong, it is important that companies know about the issue before they find out from their customers and partners. Developing a robust strategy for observability involves setting policies for how software will be instrumented, where logs will be stored and how they will be searched and analysed. Getting it right enables companies to trace end-to-end customer journeys, proactively monitor the health of their services, detect and respond to incidents quickly.
Developing a fix is of little use if the required changes cannot be deployed quickly. Minimising service disruption will depend on a business’s ability to deploy changes across its production environments. Continuous integration and deployment pipelines (CI/CD) enable this to happen, but in our experience, many businesses are still constrained by manual steps. We work with our customers to define and automate their deployment pipeline and build up automated test coverage.
The team at Jade Software are heading to the Adapt CIO Edge event in Sydney on 29 August to discuss this and other technology challenges facing Insurance Companies.
To learn more about systems continuity with Jade Software, visit our website.