Creeping criticality

Why do some industries and organizations suffer more serious, high profile outages than others?

In a recent Uptime Intelligence Note, we considered a June 2019 report issued by the US General Accounting Office (GAO) on the IT resiliency of US airlines. The GAO wanted to better understand if the all-too-frequent IT outages and resultant chaos passengers face have any common causes and if so, how they could be addressed. (Since we published that Note, the UK-owned carrier British Airways suffered its second big outage in two years, once again stranding tens of thousands of passengers and facing heavy costs.)

The GAO report didn’t really uncover much new: there was, in some cases, a need for better testing, a little more redundancy needed here and there, certainly some improved processes. But despite suspicions of under-investment, there was nothing systemic. The causes of the outages were varied and, although often avoidable when looked at in hindsight, not necessarily predictable.