On the Saturday morning of the recent holiday weekend BA’s computer systems suffered an outage, the details are not public, although there is a suggestion that there was a power surge in one of BA’s data centers that caused damage to hardware. Whilst the why is important to BA’s technicians who will have been working all over the holiday weekend to resolve the issue and subsequent fallout, the more interesting lessons come from looking at what can be learned from the incident as a whole.
In the week when the U.S. Secret Service appears to have concluded that the recent Presidential election was subverted by state sponsored hackers it is becoming clearer to the wider world that businesses need to have an incident response plan. Such a plan is very much in line with the NIST Cyber Framework under the category Respond – Develop and implement the appropriate activities to take action regarding a detected cybersecurity event.