More like it’s a major wakeup call for companies that won’t pay to keep their IT up to date and hire good IT personnel. Giant enterprises like Colonial rarely upgrade, requests to improve security are usually rejected, then they sit around with Shocked Pikachu Face when their Windows 2000 servers get hacked and their inadequate backup precautions render them prostrate before ransomware.
This should never have happened - modern enterprise IT standards would have made this, at worst, a nuke-and-pave restore to get basic functionality back in hours. Every exec that denied needed upgrades should be fired, and if their IT leadership wasn’t screaming for upgrades and backups, they need to go as well.
It takes a worry wart to keep systems ready for failure. Hardly anyone is capable of maintaining a sense of urgency and diligence about this kind of thing.
The rank and file just assume the systems will always work and become not the least bit prepared for failure. The perfectly obvious but probably stupid question that comes to mind is, isn’t there a way for manual over ride? Probably have not trained to do this in eons and are afraid of what might happen if they do try it.
Nobody wants to pay for preparation and nobody wants to hear about it. Failure is just too far down the priority list for most managers. The people who do care about this kind of thing are just trouble makers in management’s eyes.
The only thing I have seen that gets management’s attention is the fear they may make the headlines and even that one gets stale and loses its impact. Very few understand and subscribe to risk management in the sense that somebody must be 100% prepared for the remote possibility of a failure. That somebody must be the right guy and appreciated at a very high level because nobody else will. Probability may be small but consequence can be catastrophic. Ask AIG about low probability company crushing events, AIG should have been destroyed for their CDS type play but instead were bailed out as too big to fail.
Being the guy who is responsible for emergency response is a thankless job that takes a champion and champions get tire and tired of being taken for granted.