Prompted by this absolutely wild Crowdstrike-induced global outage, reposting a blog post I wrote...
> Software debt is networked.
> I'm writing this in the wake of the aftermath of the disclosure of the log4j zero-day vulnerability. But this is only a recent example of just one kind of networked risk.
> With managed services we effectively add one more level to the Inception world of our software organisation. We outsource nice big chunks of supply chain risk management, but we in-source a different risk of depending critically on entities that we do not control and cannot fix if they fail.
> Not to mention the fact that change ripples through the parallel yet deeply enmeshed dimensions of cyberspace and meatspace. Code running on hardware is inexorably tied to concepts running in wetware. Of course, at this level of abstraction, the notion applies to any field of human endeavour. Yet, it is so much more true of software. Because software is essentially the thoughts of people being played on repeat.
> Software debt is networked.
> I'm writing this in the wake of the aftermath of the disclosure of the log4j zero-day vulnerability. But this is only a recent example of just one kind of networked risk.
> With managed services we effectively add one more level to the Inception world of our software organisation. We outsource nice big chunks of supply chain risk management, but we in-source a different risk of depending critically on entities that we do not control and cannot fix if they fail.
> Not to mention the fact that change ripples through the parallel yet deeply enmeshed dimensions of cyberspace and meatspace. Code running on hardware is inexorably tied to concepts running in wetware. Of course, at this level of abstraction, the notion applies to any field of human endeavour. Yet, it is so much more true of software. Because software is essentially the thoughts of people being played on repeat.