Researcher: CrowdStrike blunder could benefit open source

CrowdStrike's faulty update, which sparked a massive IT outage, might prompt more enterprises to diversify their IT environments and use open source technology to mitigate damage from similar large-scale events, a university researcher said.

On July 19, CrowdStrike, a cloud cybersecurity company, released a relatively minor update with a bug that crashed millions of Windows computers used by airlines, banks, hospitals, media companies and stock exchanges. CrowdStrike responded with a fix within an hour, but the time it took for organizations to roll it out varied from hours to days.

Today's tech industry has consolidated around a relatively small number of vendors. For example, AWS, Microsoft and Google controlled 67% of the public cloud market in the fourth quarter of 2023, according to Synergy Research Group.

CrowdStrike, with $2.24 billion in revenues in the 2023 fiscal year, claims to have 29,000 customers, including more than half of the Fortune 500. CrowdStrike had the largest share of the managed security services market in 2022, according to Gartner.

That level of market concentration increases the possibility of a software outage affecting a company and its partners at the same time, said Lee McKnight, an associate professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University.

"That's a compounding risk that we haven't thought of before," McKnight said. "The C-suite level is where they have to ask, 'What are the points of compound risk?'"

McKnight expects enterprises with sufficient IT talent to use more open source technology with their commercial products. For example, computers running the open source Linux operating system were unaffected by the CrowdStrike update.

The flawed file caused only Windows computers to fail because it had direct access to the Windows OS kernel. The Linux kernel isn't accessible to software developers.

"If [preventative technology] is going to grow, it's probably going to grow out of the open source community," McKnight said. "There's growing recognition that open source software can have a wider benefit for enterprises, and one of them is around security."

McKnight acknowledges that working with open source technology requires having developers on hand, so it's an option that'll likely appeal to larger enterprises. "It's a challenge for a smaller shop," he said.

Discussions around adding more technology will likely give enterprises whiplash, said Mike Walters, president and co-founder of cloud-based risk management software maker Action1. Before the CrowdStrike blunder, analysts encouraged organizations to have fewer vendors to simplify their IT environments.

"Now they're saying having more vendors is better," Walters said. "But it's a slippery slope. With more vendors, [IT] gets more and more complex."

Antone Gonsalves is an editor at large for TechTarget Editorial, reporting on industry trends critical to enterprise tech buyers. He has worked in tech journalism for 25 years and is based in San Francisco. Have a news tip? Please drop him an email.