Early IT takeaways from the CrowdStrike outage

For those who have machines back up and recovered post-CrowdStrike, there are certain items you should review. First is consider reissuing Bitlocker recovery keys. If you handed out the recovery key manually, consider reissuing and rotating keys.

If you are considering changes to your infrastructure, rather than ripping out your technology and replacing it with a different operating system, consider the alternative of changing how you deploy software and restrict what software is allowed to run on these special-purpose machines. We use antivirus because we don’t have a limit on what we allow to run on our systems. If we spent the time and resources limiting what is allowed to run, machines would be more secure.

Of course, you do need to reconsider what operating system is used for what purpose. We’ve seen too many social media posts of bluescreens on what are merely overgrown notification screens. Do you truly need a full operating system to merely provide information? Or are there alternative ways that you can provide that same information?