From Sony breach to CrowdStrike, IT Ops-SecOps rift deepened

Rich Lane is currently IT director at the City of Medford, Massachusetts, and has had a varied career in IT infrastructure and operations. He served as VP of digital operations strategy for data security software vendor Netenrich from 2021 to 2022, and as a Forrester Research analyst from 2018 to 2021. Before that, Lane worked as a professional services consultant for observability vendor Splunk, and as IT infrastructure and operations manager at Bain Capital.

From Lane's perspective, the CrowdStrike outage reflected an organizational disconnect at many companies between the IT security teams that choose tools and the infrastructure operations teams that must support those tools in production. In Lane's experience, this rift began to grow after the high-profile Sony Pictures data breach ten years ago as enterprises re-emphasized cybersecurity.

Now, he says, CrowdStrike should be a sign it's time for the two groups to come together again and come up with more resilient ways to operate security tools, demand better communication from vendors during incidents, and to better account for the human factor in cyberattacks.