The fact the computing industry started out with centralized computing (naturally, due to costs of computing equipment), then migrated to distributed computing, and is now relatively back to centralized computing (just in the “cloud” vs. on-premises mains), is quite humorous, and also very disturbing.
Simply put, the danger of centralized computing lies in the fact that it is centralized. Anything that threatens that service clearly threatens all of its clients. And in modern times, that also means anything that threatens connections to that service as well.
Both Crowdstrike and Azure are layers on that centralized service which help clients with various management aspects. As such, they are “gates” through which client traffic must flow. So, if anything happens to either of those services, well, we saw what happened.
Centralizing services does make them inherently easier to manage. However, it also makes a problem with that management more catastrophic as the scope of the number of clients increases. Decentralized services may make management issues more complex, but problems should have a lesser degree of impact on the scope of clients.
Also to be considered are the many varied and complex nuances of patch issuance for existing software. Factors such as urgency, limited scope testing, management directives, and more, greatly affect patch success or failure.
Whatever the actual circumstances that caused the outages experienced by these two major services, it is clear that when certain services get very large and closer to centralized, a problematic patch, or other catastrophe such as mass Internet outage, could render clients inoperable for a large period time. This will result in poor public relations and loss of business.
We generally favor on-premises servers, workstations, and software given what just recently occurred. That being said, if a cloud service fits a client need and the risks are acceptable after thinking twice, there’s no reason not to implement such a solution.
There are other options to CrowdStrike, though Azure is tied to Microsoft’s services (such as Defender Business). If you are interested in what we have to offer, please feel free to contact us!
