How to prevent outages that aren't your fault

In today's interconnected world, your business and your revenue may — and most likely will — depend on another company and their product. Whether that's cloud applications or the operating system your computers run on. As we saw this year with CrowdStrike, which took down nearly 8.5 million computers. Unfortunately, most of those were in government and critical infrastructure.

So how do I avoid this situation?

In short: probably you can't, and you'll have to get lucky. Or, more accurately, unlucky — events like this don't happen often. It's reasonable to stick to large companies with solid reputations that are as transparent as possible about where they store your data, who they share or sell it to, and how they handle it generally.

How do I prevent bigger problems?

If a situation like this hits, the priority is saving what you can. That means securing every account with MFA — it isn't 100%, but it's definitely an extra layer that can stop 99% of attacks. Encrypt what you can. If you have sensitive data sitting in a plain-text file somewhere, it's time to change that (and yes, this really happens). And if that data is on a server you don't directly host in your company, change it RIGHT NOW. Tell your IT specialist, or learn about it yourself (the topic is nicely explained on this site). And as always, use strong, unique passwords, back up using the 3-2-1 method, and explain to your employees how and why to do it.