Russell Craig: Former Microsoft National Technology Officer says diversifying tech landscape may not be enough to protect from global outages

Belief it's not as simple as diversifying New Zealand's technology landscape to protect us from global IT outages.  

Friday's global outage - which impacted an estimated 8.5 million Microsoft machines - was triggered by an update from global cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. 

Former Microsoft National Technology Officer Russell Craig told Mike Hosking there's no denying we are hugely reliant on big tech. 

“But they bring us a lot of benefits. Although it’s appealing to think if we had more smaller players, we’d have more diversity and less risk, but I don’t know whether that stacks up.” 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
There's crash one for the headline writers. Wasn't it the
largest outage in history? And then again, it's not like
computer updates go back to the eighteen thirties, so not
that much history at all. The blue screen of death
and a lot of people delayed at airports and supermarkets.
Microsoft's former national tech officer now independent tech expert Russell
Craig's with us on this. Russell, very good morning to you.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Hi, Mike, how are you very well?

Speaker 1 (00:21):
And you couldn't work it out? When I read eight
and a half million Microsoft units on Saturday morning, I thought, geez,
that's a lot of units. But I thought that was
eight and a half million in New Zealand, not the
entire world. So was this a big deal or not?

Speaker 2 (00:33):
It was a huge deal, Mike. Although eight and a
half million Windows devices as least some one percent of
all the devices running Windows in the world.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
Are CrowdStrike any good or are they famous for this stuff?

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Look, crowd Striker an exceptionally strong organization and generally do
a tremendous job. In this case, obviously, they've let themselves down,
they've let the customers down, they've let the world down,
and I'm sure that's causing a lot of inks in
the boardroom.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
Somebody said, you never do an update on a Friday?
Is that reasonable?

Speaker 2 (01:07):
Any day of the week, you know you've got some
risk and rolling out a software update on the scale mic?

Speaker 1 (01:12):
So what do we know about these sort of things
when a company goes to put an update out the size?
Do they know what's going to happen or do they
just think they know what's going to happen.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
Ultimately, you cannot be one hundred percent assured that nothing
wrong or bad is going to happen when you roll
out these type of updates, particularly if you're in the
business that cloud strikers in where they're having to roll
their updates really fast to respond to cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities, which,
as you know, move very fast. So they do their

(01:45):
best with testing, but you cannot get one hundred percent confidence.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
Are we too reliant on big players? Hence, when a
big player goes down, so many people go down. Is
there enough comp in the market and you know, enough
companies doing this and we could all go and spread
out risk more thinly?

Speaker 2 (02:00):
I don't think that's the case. Yes, we're hugely reliant
upon big players. But they bring us a lot of
benefits as well. I don't think, although it's appealing to
think if we had more smaller players we'd have more
diversity and less risk, but I don't know whether that
stacks up to really hard analysis.

Speaker 1 (02:19):
Appreciate your time, Russell Russell Craig, who's an independent IT
expert these days, I work you through a few of
the numbers who got hit, who didn't. China got away
with it largely, Australia seem to be hit poorly. We
seemed by and large to be okay.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
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