SAINT PAUL, Minn., Nov. 20, 2024 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- A seemingly small coding error caused the largest IT outage in history, upending the world's most prominent organizations. Identified as a corrupted July update for CrowdStrike, a popular third-party cybersecurity solution among Fortune 500 companies, the CrowdStrike meltdown rocked the global economy, grounded over 10,000 flights, impacted public transit across major cities, and disrupted the international supply chain.
This devastating event should signal to COOs the need to find third-party solutions that can readily handle an influx of requests, quickly adapt to changing needs, and have a customer support team prepared to solve any issues. Finding reliable third-party solutions can be challenging since organizations have to continually evaluate their performance, security protocols, and compliance standards. But what happens when vetted third-party solutions still fail?
In this article, we'll discuss the importance of finding resilient software providers and then introduce key strategies to ensure operational resilience for your organization.
Why You Should Never Compromise on Resilient Solutions
When third-party solutions falter, organizations compromise data privacy, incur financial losses, and jeopardize customer trust.
Compromised Data Privacy
Companies impacted by the CrowdStrike failure weren't just disrupted—their security was completely compromised, exposing vulnerabilities to ongoing attacks. When third-party solutions fail to provide adequate security, customers' and employees' personal data is left open to hackers and cybercriminals.
For logistics and manufacturing industries that rely heavily on trade secrets and proprietary data, these types of data breaches can be potentially ruinous. The strain of cyberattacks is so severe that 60% of small businesses close within six months.
Lost Business and Increased Costs
In addition to potential data losses and expensive compliance violations, disruptions can lead to missed business opportunities and other inflated costs. The fallout from CrowdStrike is estimated to cost Fortune 500 companies at least $5.4 billion, and only 10-20% of these losses will be covered by cyber insurance.
For logistics and manufacturing companies, disruptions can have instant ramifications, impacting shipping, production schedules, and travel management. These issues lead to missed deadlines, lost contracts, and ballooned operational expenses, and the loss of business can continue well beyond the actual disrupting event.
Reputation Damage and the Loss of Customer Trust
Customers trust organizations to keep their data safe. A study from Vercara found that 66% of US consumers would not trust an organization after a data breach. Another 44% said they would hold the company responsible for lacking the proper security measures to prevent a breach.
This blame is particularly problematic for logistics and manufacturing companies tasked with guarding sensitive information, such as addresses, financial records, and client proprietary designs and blueprints.
While there are risks, companies realistically need to use third-party solutions to optimize operations. So, what can COOs do to mitigate these risks? Here are three key strategies to balance the risk of third-party solutions while maintaining business continuity.
Three Key Strategies to Improve Resilience
Organizations must formulate fallback plans, prioritize data backups, and utilize trustworthy automation solutions to achieve comprehensive operational resilience with third-party solutions.
Have a Fallback Plan
To maintain business continuity during disruptions, a thorough contingency plan is key to maintaining vital operations, such as invoicing, delivery scheduling, and route management—no matter the catastrophe. Also, COOs must ensure third-party partners have extensive disaster recovery plans, and consider their uptime guarantees, redundancy measures, and scalability.
Prioritize Data Backups
Data backups serve as a critical element in contingency planning. Storing data offline keeps information safe and accessible even when primary systems fail, allowing companies to continue operations and minimize data loss. However, building impenetrable data backups requires holistic security measures. Advanced encryption, for example, safeguards information by keeping it unreadable during transfers and at rest. To keep data safe for authorized users on any device, organizations turn to cloud-based security solutions with Zero-Trust access protocols.
Capitalize on Automation
Even in a major shutdown like CrowdStrike, automated workflows ensure that businesses can operate as usual, even while employees scramble to fix impacted processes. Emerging as a go-to solution for operational resilience, Secure Document Generation tools automate document workflows, creating, delivering, and storing files with just one click. For data privacy needs, DocGen safely stores files using strict security protocols. For data backups, files are sent to integrated third-party locations, like Salesforce, Dropbox, and Google Drive.
Fortifying Operations for the Future
When third-party solutions fail, they have immediate and long-lasting effects on operations, threatening to compromise sensitive information, surge costs, and erode consumer trust. Organizations can mitigate these risks by developing comprehensive fallback plans, securing data backups, and utilizing reliable automation software like DocGen.
Learn how COOs can leverage cutting-edge DocGen solutions to strengthen operational resilience.
About Inkit
Trusted by those who put privacy first, Inkit is the only Secure Document Generation (SDG) software that allows users to generate, sign, and retain documents in total privacy.
Scale your workflows using our DocGen automation solution to create documents and forms using custom templates and data sources with our API.
Elevate the security of your legally-binding documents with digital signatures. Protect agreements with advanced encryption and authenticity certificates to streamline processes and ensure peace of mind.
Get the privacy and automation your team needs to optimize records management and compliance. Create disappearing documents that automatically expire based on predesignated parameters.
Connect seamlessly with your favorite apps to generate Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PDF, and HTML documents. Experience an all-inclusive solution for ultimate file control and security.
