In this special Risk! Engineers Talk Governance episode, due diligence engineers Richard Robinson and Gaye Francis discuss the recent IT outage that affected systems worldwide and the importance of criticality and resilience. 

Main take-aways include:

• The outage was predictable and foreseeable. It was a critical incident.
• You can't gold plate a single system so that it won't fail. 
• The importance of redundancy – ensuring you've got another independent system that doesn't rely on the primary system.
• Engineering organisations are required to look at the credible worst case scenarios that can happen and what you can do and put in place to make sure that they're managed
• You need to positively demonstrate due diligence about what you're doing. And due diligence means that you take into account the credible critical issues. 
• When doing these reviews, you have to talk with the senior decision makers, who understand the business’ critical requirements.

If you’d like to find out more about Richard and Gaye’s work, head to https://www.r2a.com.au.

The book they refer to is Due Diligence Engineering and can be purchased online at https://www.r2a.com.au/store/p/r2a-engineering-due-diligence-textbook.