The world is still taking stock after a faulty software update from CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. caused one of the largest-ever information technology outages on Friday.

The CrowdStrike outage impact was a main subject of conversation for theCUBE Research industry analysts John Furrier (pictured, left) and Dave Vellante (right) to dive into on the latest episode of theCUBE Podcast.

“This CrowdStrike story is kind of an inside baseball story,” Furrier said. “Some metadata got launched, config files got put out there, caused a ripple effect. If you’re in the business, you know what this means. But to me, this is a groundbreaking story.”

The outage was important given its scale, impacting everyone from airlines to medical facilities. The CrowdStrike outage impact was felt by every single person in America, as well as everyone connected to it, Furrier noted.

“It wasn’t like a Stuxnet or a worm virus, where it went around and systematically just crippled things over time,” he said. “It wasn’t a security incident. It was a process problem.”

There’s no understanding yet of the financial and personal harm that this outage has caused. But the cost of the incident is likely to be massive, according to Furrier.

“This is not in the normal lanes of the classic data backup and recovery,” he said. “This was a software update, metadata configuration, gone bad. This is just self-inflicted.”

CrowdStrike outage impact survey results

One of the big remaining questions concerns CrowdStrike’s damage and exposure moving forward. Enterprise Technology Research conducted a flash survey and asked if the system outages caused companies to reconsider how they position CrowdStrike in their security stacks.

“Look at this. Thirty-two percent [say], ‘Yes, we are likely to reconsider plans to consolidate our stack around CrowdStrike,’” Vellante said. “Remember, consolidation is a big theme of their value proposition.”

The survey stated that 23% said they would likely consider options to reduce their reliance on CrowdStrike in the future, meaning 55% would rethink their plans. But there were other results in the survey that were a little less bad for CrowdStrike, according to Vellante.

“Five out of the 100 said, ‘100%, we’re replacing them,’” Vellante said. “They were probably already likely to do that or doing that. And then 9% said, ‘Very likely.’ So 14% saying, ‘We’re probably going to replace.’ Now here’s the other thing. This is the ace in the hole for CrowdStrike. It ain’t that easy to replace CrowdStrike.”

Despite that, this is not a good thing for the company. That’s why there should be caution applied in the market, according to Vellante.

“People are thinking, ‘Wow, this is maybe a buying opportunity for a great company.’ I would be really careful here,” Vellante said. “I would be really, really careful.”

A wake-up call on the digital transformation conversation

Beyond the financial and personal impacts, the CrowdStrike outage impact also includes a reminder of how fragile the entire system is. It makes one wonder what would happen should critical infrastructure fail at a larger scale.

“This is going to be a warning shot, to start having the conversation around, forget ethical AI. How about functional systems,” Furrier said. “This is going to put a wet blanket, I think, on some of the hype cycle market, and really kind of narrow the conversation down.”

This is a wake-up call and is going to have a real impact on the digital transformation conversation, especially as everyone’s rebuilding systems for generative AI, Furrier added. The learning on this has nothing to do with security breaches.

“This is about what the future new normal is going to look like, Dave,” Furrier said. “This is a big deal, in my opinion. I’m putting it out there, and we’ll be tracking it, and we’ll see where it goes.”

This is also a wake-up call for automation, according to Vellante. For years, IT people have been very concerned about automation for this very reason.

“AI is all about automation, agents, systems of agency, and co-pilots. This is going to cause a lot of organizations to pump the brakes on that organization,” Vellante said. “Frankly, if I’m in the C-suite, I’m coming down, ‘What kind of automation are we doing? What are the risks? I want to see the risk assessments on my desk by Monday morning.’”

Supercloud 7 is quickly approaching

The next Supercloud event, Supercloud 7: Get Ready for the Next Data Platform, is drawing closer. On July 30, Furrier, Vellante, and a full team of analysts at theCUBE Research will get set to draw the battle lines and evaluate the next data platform.

As part of the event, Enterprise Technology Research is partnering with theCUBE to do a flash survey of 50 customers of Snowflake Inc. and Databricks Inc. as the chess match between the companies continues.

The goal of the survey is to get a sense as to how customers are thinking about open table formats and how they’re thinking about governing them, according to Vellante.

“They launched the survey last week to those 50 customers, they already got 65. Again, ETR [is] amazing,” Vellante said. “We’ll be releasing results there with ETR and asking folks to comment on that.”

The survey results, as well as a continued focus on opportunities for innovation, will be of chief focus during Supercloud 7. There will be no shortage of illuminating conversations at the event, Furrier noted.

“Databricks, Snowflake, practitioners, all the heavy hitters coming in,” he said.

Watch the full podcast below to find out why these industry pros were mentioned:

Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission
George W. Bush, 43rd U.S. president
JD Vance, U.S. senator
John F. Kennedy, 35th U.S. president
Joe Biden, 46th U.S. president
Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina
Marco Rubio, U.S. senator
Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida
Ted Cruz, U.S. senator
Donald Trump, 45th United States president
Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO of Microsoft
George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike
Rob Strechay, managing director and principal analyst at theCUBE Research
Christophe Bertrand, principal analyst at theCUBE Research
Bob Laliberte, principal analyst at theCUBE Research
Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel
Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta
Nicholas G. Carr, American journalist and writer
Matt Garman, CEO of AWS
Kevin Mandia, CEO of Mandiant
Jeff Bezos, chairman at Amazon
Hock Tan, president and CEO of Broadcom
Ben Reitzes, managing director at Melius Research
Safra Catz, CEO at Oracle Corp.
Rob Hof, editor-in-chief at SiliconANGLE Media
Kristen Nicole Martin, director of content operations at theCUBE
Lisa Spelman, corporate VP and GM of Intel Xeon products at Intel
Zhamak Dehghani, founder and CEO of Nextdata
Benoit Dageville, president of product and co-founder at Snowflake
Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of AI and data at AWS

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Photo: SiliconANGLE