Are You Ready to Respond to an IT Disruption?

Last summer, a routine update at a cybersecurity firm triggered a global IT disruption, impacting customer endpoints and servers across countless enterprise companies on every continent. This week, another worldwide internet disruption affected systems, web sites, and applications of some of the world’s largest enterprises and government agencies.

Disruptions can and do happen to any organization, including the world’s largest technology leaders with highly sophisticated, state-of-the-art systems, as evidenced by these two events.

Identifying the culprit in both situations was the onus of the providers, which were relatively quick in both cases. Resolution within their environments followed. And customers were provided with instructions for their IT teams to implement as necessary.

Common Problems No One Is Immune To

It is easy to see how businesses feel vulnerable, given their lack of control when these IT disruptions occur. However, both situations offer lessons that can spark meaningful conversations, prompt reviews or audits, and drive action plans across corporate IT organizations.

The reasons for the disruptions in both cases are commonly occurring problems that happen regularly in networking, regardless of the company’s size or business focus. In one case, it was a faulty software upgrade, and the more recent case was due to a widespread Domain Name System (DNS) issue. Both are rooted in the core, everyday infrastructure that modern enterprises depend on.

 The message is loud and clear: IT disruptions are inevitable. The question isn’t if they’ll happen—it’s when, and more importantly, how prepared are you to respond?

IT disruptions are inevitable. The question isn’t if they’ll happen—it’s when, and more importantly, how prepared are you to respond?

Four Steps to Prepare for an IT Outage in Your Network

Unplanned outages are exactly that. One moment, the network and applications are operating as expected, and the next, they are suddenly unavailable. The reality is, unplanned outages are a daily reality, and no one is immune. Further, both of the disruptions involved technology that virtually every enterprise uses: DNS services and routine software updates.

In the wake of a major network outage, enterprises may pause, take stock of the business impact, and evaluate their own networks to determine how they can prevent, avoid, or rapidly respond to a similar situation. Organizations can't stop things from breaking in global service provider environments, but they can build resilience into their own environment and processes.

Here are four steps every enterprise IT and network operations team can prioritize to prepare for the next outage.

Step 1: Implement True Observability—Not Just Monitoring
Monitoring may tell you what is broken, while observability helps you understand why and where. Ineffective tool clutter has plagued many organizations for years now; most enterprises have logs, metrics, and alerts coming from dozens of tools, yet they still scramble for root cause when things go down. Why? Because they’re missing context.

Context often comes from deep packet inspection (DPI). DPI-based observability reveals the actual traffic flows across the infrastructure, showing the interactions between applications, services, and networks in real time. For instance, when DNS or an update fails, DPI can help pinpoint whether it's a local configuration issue, a third-party dependency, or a network path problem. With DPI, IT is not waiting on a ticket from a DNS vendor; they already know where the issue lies and how it’s impacting users. DPI reduces the mean time to knowledge (MTTK) on why the problem exists, as well as lowering the overall mean time to restore (MTTR) services in the environment.

Step 2: Establish Incident Readiness Processes
Incident response takes preparation and strategy. Enterprises must treat outages like fire drills: practiced, rehearsed, and continuously refined. Having the proper tools is only one part. Clear processes need to be outlined, escalation paths defined, and cross-functional teams aligned before organizations can effectively deal with outages.

Similarly, establishing maintenance, upgrade, and application update procedures is also essential. Steps to avoid potential issues, such as last summer’s software update outage, might include:

• Running trial updates under “lab” conditions first to assess network implications and success
• Establishing go/no-go decision criteria for the update
• Listing and prioritizing company employees to be notified if the update fails
• Instituting procedures for rapid root cause identification, including tools, teams, and partners involved
• Developing a communications plan for stakeholders and executives, should it be required

Although it is impossible to avoid every potential outage, steps can be put in place to ensure the corporate and IT response is swift and confident when it hits.

Step 3: Understand What You Control and Don’t Control
Every IT environment is a complex jungle of dependencies, some of which the business controls and some of which it doesn’t, particularly those provided by strategic technology partners. This is true with software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms, DNS providers, content delivery networks (CDNs), cloud services, and internal microservices, to name a few. These systems are all outside direct control of IT, should an outage occur.

Enterprise wide visibility is a powerful control that provides essential information about your user community, network, and applications. Modern observability platforms are available to track not just the corporate environment, but also key third-party dependencies. Being aware of the services your users rely on and how those services are connected gives organizations an edge when time is of the essence.

Step 4: Build Collaboration Across Teams and Vendors
In high-stakes incidents, silos are the enemy. NetOps, SecOps, CloudOps, and application teams must collaborate in real time avoid losing valuable minutes on finger-pointing. This requires shared data, a common language, and tools that bridge visibility gaps across different domains.

It is equally important to build strong, collaborative vendor relationships before the storm hits. Know who to call, what service level agreements (SLAs) apply, and how your vendors will support you under fire. An outage is not the time to figure out whose responsibility something is—it’s the time to act. Leveraging observability solutions that have DPI-based information is exactly the evidence teams need to help all parties collaborate on root cause and develop the right strategy to restore services to normal operation.

Are You Ready to Respond?

It only took a year to be reminded that disruptions don’t wait for IT teams to be ready. They can stem from the most routine operations, such as software updates and DNS queries. What matters is your ability to detect, respond, and recover fast.

Enterprise environments are complex, and much of it is outside the control of corporate IT organizations. But with observability grounded in DPI, well-practiced processes, clear visibility into dependencies, and coordinated collaboration, organizations have the power to control their readiness.

So, are you ready to respond to the next IT disruption?

Learn more about NETSCOUT’s observability solutions and how you can use DPI for Smart Data to wrestle control of your DNS services.