Before the techies took a sigh of TGIF and kick-started their day on July 19th, the tech world turned haywire with the massive global outage that caused the Blue Screen of Death. This affected Microsoft users across every industry worldwide including the 911 lines, banks, hospitals, airlines, and the London Stock Exchange. The world reached a near standstill with CrowdStrike’s latest cybersecurity update creating quite a glitch in every operation.
Having deployed advanced technical architecture, redundant systems, robust cybersecurity protocols, and contingency strategies in place, Epixel MLM Software ensured that none of its customers operating at various corners of the world were stuck by the CrowdStrike outage.
CrowdStrike outage explained
CrowdStrike is a software company with expertise in endpoint protection and threat intelligence. Further to the release of a software update on July 19, 2024, BSOD, or blue screens of death appeared on Windows screens interrupting millions of Windows users in the world. The global impact caused by the downtime cost millions in lost revenue for CrowdStrike and its credibility and integrity of a lifetime.
As a result, CrowdStrike shares dropped by 11% and its co-founder and CEO George Kurtz’s net worth saw a steep fall by a massive $300 million. The following Monday, that is 22nd July 2024, CrowdStrike shares closed at a loss of 13.46% portraying how the impact prevailed despite issuing a patch to fix the error.
The sales shook
Needless to say, the repercussions of this outage in the direct selling and MLM sector weren’t less. Creating a buzz in business operations to causing communication hitches, the industry faced a fair share of financial losses. Unable to process transactions and sales activities, MLM businesses of all capacities saw a drop in their sales figures leading to potential revenue loss especially those who are heavily dependent on digital payments and transactions.
While most businesses gripped back to normal and restored their operations quickly, such instances come as a candid reminder for direct selling businesses on the need to build a resilient framework during the time of such unprecedented disruption in the future.
What are the key direct selling areas that were severely hit by the outage?
Orders overdue
Many direct selling and MLM brands that have employed CrowdStrike’s security interface to safeguard their e-sales platforms couldn’t perform operations for hours to days. Distributors were not able to place or process orders based on customer requisites. This weighed heavily on sales causing potential financial loss.
Delayed customer service
With the outage hampering the functioning of communication platforms and tools used by MLM companies, connections were lost leading to delayed or no communication among the team and with customers. Complaints lodged by customers were not attended to or resolved, and companies couldn’t guide their distributors on how to deal with the situation.
Inventory miscount
MLM businesses rely on automated inventory tracking systems to fulfill their orders and keep a tab on what needs to be restocked and when. With the abrupt outage taking place, automated systems to track inventory and restocking came to a standstill. This took a heavy toll in maintaining stock levels and delivering goods as per orders.
These major pillars resulted in order fulfillment, order processing, marketing, promotions, and allied business operations causing heavy implications on brand integrity, reputation, and revenue.
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A foolproof business structure
While it is said that we learn through what we go through, businesses cannot always afford to fall short of such errors and faults as they could impact the growth and success of the brand. A severe blow like CrowdStrike’s is when direct selling businesses realize the need to have a more resilient and robust security framework. This very instance has encouraged MLM businesses to invest in and adapt to diverse technological solutions with advanced backup systems, substitute software solutions, and state-of-the-art IT support structure.
MLM businesses are reassessing their IT strategies including adopting decentralized systems less susceptible to single points of failure, ideally sparking a trend of direct selling companies aiming to build a more resilient IT infrastructure.
So how are direct selling businesses moving forward post the CrowdStrike outage?
Integrating BCP
BCP or Business Continuity Planning is a strategic process that businesses often overlook without realizing its potential to create a positive impact on the brand. BCP acts as a secure framework that enables organizations to stay alert and respond to and recover from potential disruptions that could create a major impact on their operations. BCP includes
Assessing risks and vulnerabilities from time to time
Business Impact Analysis, or BIA to examine how various disruptions impacted business functions to identify possible financial, operational and reputational impacts
Developing strategies to minimize risks and seamless business operations
Training employees rigorously and testing BCP through mock drills and simulations
Reviewing BCP consistently to stay ahead of new threats and implement lessons learnt from previous incidents.
Effective recovery from disaster
A subset of BCP, MLM companies are identifying the need and necessity of embedding disaster recovery into their channel. The key objective of disaster recovery is the efficient restoration of IT systems, data, and infrastructure post disruptions. It also aids in faster resumption of critical technology operations minimizing downtime and data loss. Effective disaster recovery is carried out by
Quickly identifying and assessing hardware failures, cyberattacks, natural disasters, and human errors
Analyzing RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective), maximum acceptable time the systems and applications can be offline and, the maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time denoting the point to which data must be restored
Structuring DRP or Disaster Recovery Plan for steps to be taken before, during and after a disaster to restore data and IT systems.
Zeroing in on EDR
EDR or Endpoint Detection and Response is an innovative cybersecurity technology that can promptly detect, investigate and respond to suspicious activities and potential threats on endpoints like computers, servers and mobile devices. With EDR, direct selling businesses can gain real-time insights on endpoint activities and offer support to detect threats, analyze and resolve the same.
EDR can be effectively executed through
Continuous monitoring of endpoint activities to detect anomalies indicating security threat
Detecting threats using advanced analytics, machine learning, and behavioral analysis. EDR tools can thoroughly detect a wide range of threats ranging from malware, ransomware, and advanced persistent threats (APTs).
Investigating the incident to understand its nature and scope including how the threat made its way to the system, and how has it impacted data or systems.
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Building threat less tomorrows
While each threat and challenge is a new learning, being interrupted by one is not something that direct selling businesses can always afford. Considering the numerous factors involved in it from communication to financial transactions to logistics, training and so forth, direct selling businesses are eyeing every opportunity to stay resilient to threats of all sorts.
While CrowdStrike was one of the worst nightmares to come true for businesses across the world, direct selling businesses learned lessons of resilience, preparedness, and the importance of groundbreaking cybersecurity systems. This, for sure, shall pave a brighter future for the industry less prone to threats and more capable of handling disruptions.
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