Following the Crowdstrike event that caused many Microsoft Windows powered operating systems to halt, we are conducting a review how this happened. Our initial findings are concerning because of safeguards we employ to avoid this type of error from our partners and vendors. A large portion of our clients' monthly costs involve subscriptions to third-party vendors which we pay for on a client’s behalf and pass-on through afterwards.

Due to the nature of cyber threats, automated updates are crucial to stopping threats as soon as possible for the large number of devices managed simultaneously. MedicTek diligently reviews and schedules updates to devices based on a partially automated scheduling system; however, we set updates to delay for 1-2 verified production versions before adopting the latest “push” updates from our vendors. In the case of Crowdstrike, we were puzzled to learn that updates from this vendor were pushed-out without delay and overrode our settings to remain one level behind. In our professional opinion, this delay would have prevented an flawed update from ever reaching our managed devices for our clients and our internal operations.

While Crowdstrike products are rated as the top in the industry, we have other solutions with similar capabilities as rated by the renowned Gartner Group studies. In the upcoming weeks, we will be offering options to clients to migrate from Crowdstrike to SentinelOne, a separate U.S.-based cyber-security vendor. SentinelOne is also certified to operate with our remote monitoring and management agent, which is required on all devices that we manage.

The apology from the CEO of CrowdStrike doesn’t mitigate the fact organizations suffered an outage that incurred costs beyond the time/effort to restore systems. MedicTek is planning to waive the support services required to restore your systems from this event and we are reviewing options to help us recover our costs other than from our clients who also suffered from this event. We understand this gesture only partially covers the incidental expenses around this outage, but we acknowledge it’s the right thing to do.

If you have any questions related to this incident or would like more information on options, please contact me for a free one-on-one discussion so we can map-out what makes sense for your organization.

As a local small business with local employees who depend on our stability and resilience, we sincerely appreciate your loyalty and trust.

Sincerely,

Greg Hendrickson

Founder, Tech Support by MedicTek, Inc.