Earlier this month, California struggled with a backlog of up to 300,000 lab records in the state’s coronavirus reporting system. On August 7th, the state admitted that one of the main factors leading to the lag in reporting data was an expired server certificate.
According to CalMatters: “The backlog of a quarter-million lab records was caused by technical changes made after a server crashed and by the state’s failure to renew a certificate required to receive data from Quest Diagnostics, a commercial lab used by coronavirus testing sites across California. As a result, California did not receive Quest data from July 31 to Aug. 4.”
The State of California is not unique. According to a recent Venafi study of CIOs from the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and Australia, 60% experienced certificate-related outages that impacted critical business applications or services in 2018 alone. In addition, we know that before the pandemic machine identity related failures cost the global economy between $51-72B annually.
Preventing outages is even more critical for organizations cope with changes to all kinds of routine business processes caused by the rapid adoption of remote work. These changes are likely to cause even more certificate outages because IT and security teams are stretched even more thinly.
In response to this serious event, and in order to prevent future certificate outages, Venafi’s CEO, Jeff Hudson, has decided to take drastic action. Read his open letter to find out how Venafi is stepping up to help every organization manage their certificates effectively:
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