Great infrastructure is not enough. Introduction to risk management in I.T. – Endless Technologies

Fastly, one of the most powerful CDN services in the globe suffered almost a 2 hour downtime yesterday (June 7th 2020). This demonstrates that even if we have the latest and greatest infrastructure in the world, we still require from risk planning.

Risk management is sometimes overlooked in IT departments. The fact that we invested in the latest equipment with customer support and overnight replacement makes some people feel good about their infrastructure and forget that issues arise in the least expected times.

Risk management is an area that is mostly critical in Project Management and sometimes overseen in IT. The truth is that as was demonstrated by the fall of Fastly yesterday that affected some of the most critical and influential websites on Internet like Reddit, Financial Times, New York Times, Amazon, or the UK Government.

This seemed to be caused due an issue in the configuration of Fastly CDN(Content Delivery Network). It does not only show how important risk management is, but also how the cloud paradigm has changed the infrastructure of the internet.

There are no more centralized services, everything is moving towards a virtual and distributed model that should help mitigate some of this issues.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Benjamin Franklin

Therefore we really should not forget this critical area of Risk management which even if occasionally. Will make a huge difference.

Risk management tough has lots of different areas so what should we do? When? How do I get started?

Well, even the smallest thing is better than nothing. But we are going to introduce ypu into risk management into 4 simple steps, using the Risk Register;

Step1 – use this document to gather a list of all the possible issues you can identify.

Step 2 – Not only that but the next step is top analyze and think which of those are more probable and which can have a greater effect on your work.

By doing that we are not only more prepared to respond against challenges but makes us more aware of what should be done or what we overlooked in the past.

Step 3 – Identify how can we see that the risk happened, identify the trigger for each risk will help us in the next step.

Step4 – Finally we need to identify which kind of action can we take in case this risk happens and who would be the most adecuate person to make sure the risk is handled properly.

We hope you liked our insight into the importance of risk management, if you like to know more about the risk register you can refer to:

Project Risk Registers by Indeed

If you want to get a free Risk register template you can download from here:

Sources:

https://www.fastly.com/

https://news.yahoo.com/fastly-down-company-centre-global-113808741.html

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fastly-outage-brings-down-news-websites-content-delivery-network-problem/

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/internet-down-fastly-update-latest-working-b1861749.html

https://www.lavanguardia.com/tecnologia/20210608/7513423/caida-fastly-internet.html?facet

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/swaths-internet-outage-cloud-company-fastly-78146099

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/08/fastly-cdn-server-issue-web-outage/

Fastly CDN is down, causing websites to be unavailable globally. from sysadmin