One was NOT prepared...

I am the proud owner of a Honda Odyssey. It's a good minivan for my large family. The van hit 100K miles, so I called my preferred Honda dealership for their 100K miles service package. The service manager informed me that they were impacted by the recent CDK issues. They could not schedule any service for my car and asked that I call back in a few weeks. WEEKS...

The Register has a write up on what happened here. Basically, CDK is a company that provides nearly 15,000 automobile dealerships in America with all the software needed to run their businesses. After some kind of "incident", CDK software has gone down and impacted dealerships have had to scramble.

The dealership I typically work with was obviously wholly unprepared for such an outage. They had no records of me or my vehicle in another format. They seemingly could not estimate repairs, prepare invoices, or take payments. They might have even had issues with paying their bills and ordering parts.

I called another Honda dealership in town. I asked them if they were impacted by the CDK issues and if they were able to do repairs. The woman on the phone acknowledged that they were also impacted by the outage, but it was fine. She took my name, number, and vehicle details. I even received a text message confirming my appointment. I imagine (whether it was by luck or design) they must have had some of their business process "eggs" in non-CDK baskets.

For any business that is all in on AWS, Azure, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, or some other cloud offering or SaaS product, all these ransomware attacks, cyber "incidents", cloud outages in the news should give business leaders pause. Do you have a plan for when the unthinkable happens?

My impression is that the majority of business do not have a plan for serious business interruptions. It probably varies by sector and company size. Highly-regulated companies are perhaps required to have such a plan in place.

In my experience, I've only worked at one company that took business resumption seriously and that was WoodmenLife, a life insurance and annuity company. They had events every year to test their ability to restore systems and resume business when bad things happen.

If you're in any kind of position of leadership and your team, your department, and/or your organization doesn't have a TESTED plan for continuing business when systems go down... Well, good luck, I guess. It might only be a matter of time before you and your team are faced with an existential crisis.