CIO OPINION

Delegated IT experts can help PC end users by following the published workaround .

Nathan Hill , Distinguished VP Analyst and Chief of

Research , Gartner

The recent CrowdStrike Windows outage has African IT leaders scrambling to ensure their PCs , staff and businesses are fully operational . This advisory from Gartner analysts , Soyeb Barot , Mary Ruddy , Nathan Hill , will help address key areas for African enterprises to ensure current and future operational continuity .

African IT decision makers need to organise their action into short- , medium- and long-term programmes to help with planning , workload and stress management .

Short term : Immediate actions to be taken over next seven days

Alert and engage incident response and crisis management teams

• Use appropriate crisis communications to notify employees , clients and critical third parties of potential disruptions to services or operations .

• Verify that any information , internal and external is coming from authoritative sources to avoid the risk of secondary cyberattacks .

• Mobilise predefined crisis management teams for immediate action to prevent user mistakes , including self-service remediation actions from untrusted sources .

• This includes a single source of information validated by the IT and security teams , and shared through official and crisis communications channels .

• Designate a communications team as a point of contact for internal communication with other stakeholders to minimise disruptions and ensure consistent communication .

• Involve the security operation teams to watch for new threat intelligence related to opportunistic attacks , alerts from anomaly detection systems and other unusual activities .

38 INTELLIGENTCIO AFRICA www . intelligentcio . com