One Faulty File: Global Disruption

As I write this, billions of users are looking at “the blue screen of death.” Flights are grounded around the world, 9-1-1 service is offline in the entire state of Alaska, hospitals can’t check in patients, retailers cannot make sales because their POS systems are down, Newark airport has reverted to paper tickets for check-in, and countless other organizations are at a standstill. This is the top story on every major news site I’ve checked. 

What could cause this carnage? I thought this must be a nation state attack. Nope, it was a “flawed security update.”

What does a network outage cost?

The cost of this outage may never be fully calculated, but we know outages cost companies a staggering amount of money. While the magnitude of today’s “event” is spectacular, it’s far from being the only major outage caused by a simple mistake. 2024 has seen major disruptions at WhatsApp, McDonalds, major UK grocery retailers and Greggs bakeries,  all caused by simple configuration errors, and each negatively impacting millions of people (billions in the case of WhatsApp). Even the major cloud providers and telecom providers are subject to outages. 

Can outages be prevented?

Forward Enterprise is a mathematically accurate digital twin of the network capable of verifying compliance, preventing configuration drift, and verifying connectivity pre- and post-change. By collecting configuration and state data across the entire network the platform verifies that the network is behaving as expected, alerting engineers anytime a non-compliant configuration is detected. Put otherwise, it’s software support that prevents simple human errors from becoming multimillion dollar, headline gripping mistakes. Our customers frequently report discovering simple errors they can resolve before they experience an outage, things like missed redundancy on a critical network or simple config drift. Here are some additional examples of benefits our customers report:  

Forward Networks users on average save over $14.2 M annually, $6M is by preventing outages (as noted in the IDC’s latest Business Value Solution Brief, sponsored by Forward Networks [US52128624, June 2024]) 

A human resources management software and services reported that by using Forward Enterprise for pre- and post-change verification they eliminated human error related outages. 

“The checkout procedures for our deployment and operational teams are now built out in their workspaces. Beforehand, what would have been up to the individuals’ pre-/post-checkout routines is now part of their procedure operationally. A normal pre-/post-check would take 30 minutes. Now, it takes 5 minutes. And it’s consistent and uniform among engineers.” (IDC Business Value Solutions Brief, the value of Forward Networks)

A global bank that works with Forward Networks discovered 6,000 ports with a misconfiguration that would have rendered their IP phones used by their trading staff inoperable.  Not only did Forward Networks discover the problem before there was an issue, it did so in minutes.  By the bank’s calculations it would have cost them $100,000 to manually check the ports, an outage could have cost millions.

How does Forward Enterprise prevent outages?

Forward Enterprise is a mathematically accurate digital twin of the network capable of verifying compliance, preventing configuration drift, and verifying connectivity pre- and post-change. By collecting configuration and state data across the entire network the platform verifies that the network is behaving as expected, alerting engineers anytime a non-compliant configuration is detected. Put otherwise, it’s software support that prevents simple human errors from becoming multimillion dollar, headline gripping mistakes. Our customers frequently report discovering simple errors they can resolve before they experience an outage, things like missed redundancy on a critical network or simple config drift. Here are some additional examples of benefits our customers report:  

Forward Networks users on average save over $14.2 M annually, $6M is by preventing outages (as noted in the IDC’s latest Business Value Solution Brief, sponsored by Forward Networks [US52128624, June 2024]) 

A human resources management software and services reported that by using Forward Enterprise for pre- and post-change verification they eliminated human error related outages. 

“The checkout procedures for our deployment and operational teams are now built out in their workspaces. Beforehand, what would have been up to the individuals’ pre-/post-checkout routines is now part of their procedure operationally. A normal pre-/post-check would take 30 minutes. Now, it takes 5 minutes. And it’s consistent and uniform among engineers.” (IDC Business Value Solutions Brief, the value of Forward Networks)

A global bank that works with Forward Networks discovered 6,000 ports with a misconfiguration that would have rendered their IP phones used by their trading staff inoperable.  Not only did Forward Networks discover the problem before there was an issue, it did so in minutes.  By the bank’s calculations it would have cost them $100,000 to manually check the ports, an outage could have cost millions.

Start Preventing Outages Today

Because this particular problem wasn’t due to a network configuration error, we may not have been able to prevent it, however we’ve proven that our platform prevents outages and reduces MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution). No network is too complex for our platform, we support customers around the world and scale to support tens of thousands of devices in a single instance. We offer the option of on-prem or SaaS implementation. Because we don’t require write credentials, make changes, or firmware updates there’s no risk to your network. We also like to say Forward Enterprise is painless, we don’t require agents, additional hardware appliances, software maintenance, or racks of servers. We also integrate with applications you trust for added value (Itential, ServiceNow, Slack, Tenable, Rapid7, and more). Give us 30-minutes and we’ll show you how we can start saving your organization money and time)