Gary's Writing Pad

I am writing this somewhat “tongue in cheek,” although there are sometimes I wonder… Our society keeps getting more and more complex, with computers and software that interconnect at seemingly endless patterns. As technology has advanced, our reliance on it has also increased. However, technology is also getting more complex. Creating, maintaining, securing, and operating technology systems seem to be easy once it’s all working… but only until something breaks. Keeping these inter-connected systems working 100% of the time, however, seems to be near impossible.

The problem is that we rely so much on the amazing capability that our advanced computer systems provide, that we really struggle when things do not work as they should. The examples could fill their own website. Just two weeks ago, the FAA NOTAM outage could have caused significant outages of aircraft flights for days. A few weeks earlier, Southwest Air had inadequate computing resources to solve their scheduling problem. These are just two recent events, but can you imagine the potential of larger outages?

Imagine ATM and banking systems going offline for days or weeks. Corporate supply chain systems, energy or gas fueling systems could go offline also. Weather systems, public emergency channels, television and radio, government or police computer systems, and many more systems might be vulnerable to outages and attacks. Many of these systems have backups, but there is no guarantee that these backups are fully functional and ready to run unless tested regularly.

All I am pointing out right now is that our technology is incredible, but fallible. Too often companies or organizations throw together systems to create a new or improved capability and don’t realize how the world might be affected during an outage. Let’s just hope these issues remain isolated in our future and we don’t see the full potential of technology failing when we need it the most.