Recently, a CrowdStrike update caused widespread "blue screen of death" errors on approximately 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices worldwide, significantly impacting enterprise organizations. The incident led to technical issue in critical sectors, including airlines, banks, and TV broadcasters. CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company providing cloud-based endpoint protection and threat intelligence services, the error that not only affected its operations but also had a cascading impact on its clients who rely heavily on its services for threat detection and response.

This incident highlights the necessity for organizations to implement robust business continuity management (BCM) strategies. Effective BCM encompasses risk assessment, business impact analysis, redundancy and resources arrangement and incident response planning to ensure that organizations can maintain essential functions during disruptions. The BCM should not only covering the technical resilient and redundancy while manual operation with drill should be considered. With comprehensive BCM strategies design and on-going maintenance, risk could be addressed in the organization to minimize the impact of downtime and enable quick recovery and response from incidents.

In conclusion, the CrowdStrike update events acting as a wakeup call to different organizations on the necessity of an extensive BCM design under this highly technology- dependence and outsourcing era, to safeguard organizations’ operations, protection reputation and minimize the impact in the face of unexpected incidents.
ISO 22301 Business Continuity Management System offers a framework in governing and establishing process for business continuity.