Let me start with this – I am not “piling on.” This kind of outage could happen to anyone. I remember when I first heard that Delta had to cancel many flights over the last few days, I assumed that their systems had been hacked. I guess I’m relieved that it wasn’t that, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be in the future, for Delta or a multitude of other organizations who rely on personal information to get us where we are going or fulfill our need for a litany of products and services.
I’m writing because Wall Street Journal author Susan Carey said, “the incident has raised questions about whether the company was making the right decisions in upgrading its information technology.” I think that anytime something goes wrong there are going to be people who ask questions, as they should. Those questions should be aimed at determining what can be done to prevent something from going wrong in the future. Maybe some of that should be figuring out who could have done something differently, and understanding why they didn’t do that.
Hindsight is 20/20
Let’s not forget that it’s easy to look back and say with clarity, “this was wrong, and this was wrong, and this could have been done better, and YOU should have known that…” In the moment, however, it’s much harder. So let’s give Delta the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume they were doing the best they could – and focus on how to move forward.
As the Product Marketing Manager for the KACE K1000 Systems Management Appliance, I think that the first step in “making the right decisions in upgrading information technology” is knowing what you already have, who is using it and how. The K1000 does that. It can offer a full inventory of all the devices, software and applications touching your network. As a result, it’s possible that your organization can blacklist and remove unwanted applications from your systems, whatever their origin. It can make you more secure by helping to ensure that OS and application patches are up to date and security settings are enforced. You can save money by not over spending on unused software licenses or by redeploying equipment that is unused. You could avoid audit fines by ensuring that you are paying for all of the software you are using. It does a lot of things that are important for managing and securing your endpoints. And reducing risk and vulnerabilities.
And isn’t that a pretty good place to start when thinking about how to make things better?
