The CEO of BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, has formally thanked IT teams across the UK for their work dealing with the CrowdStrike crisis.
In an open letter, Rashik Parmar said that the work of IT staff is often taken for granted, but underpins every aspect of life.
"I would like to see more IT systems treated by government as a critical part of our national infrastructure – as important as energy suppliers, road or rail," he said.
Getting systems back up and running following the global IT outage has taken great dedication, he wrote.
"The crisis we faced last week tested everyone in our industry," he said. "I was proud that so many members of our professional community stepped up to be counted, whether advising CEOs, providing insight and updates across social media, or re-booting laptops."
While the fix is relatively straightforward, it involves manual intervention for large numbers of machines. Each device must be rebooted into safe mode manually, rather than using management tools and in some cases, this has meant carrying out several reboots of individual machines.
Over the weekend, CrowdStrike said that around 8.5 million Windows devices had been impacted, but that 'a significant number' were now back online and operational.
However, the BCS warned last week, it could take a long time to get everything back to normal.
"In some cases, the fix may be applied very quickly, but because it has to be applied to so many computers around the world, that may take longer than it sounds," said BCS fellow Adam Leon Smith.
"But if computers have reacted in a way that means they're getting into blue screens and endless loops it may be difficult to restore, and that could take days and weeks."
The BCS has called on organizations to make sure their IT teams are well supported as they deal with the crisis.
A call to professionalize IT
In his letter, Parmar also repeated the BCS's calls for IT professionals to be registered as Chartered and held to account.
"We need to ensure that senior technologists are on every board; that cyber security has a mandatory code of practice, and that government and industry expect technologists to be Chartered IT Professionals," he wrote.
"We should be proud to have our names on a professional register; we should be held accountable to the Chartered standard if we fall short, as with doctors or accountants."
Parmar added that the government should track, record and assess IT outage incidents to build up the UK's national resilience to events such as the CrowdStrike outage.
"None of these things in isolation will ensure software never fails – it is the quality and commitment of software experts and increasing education among non-technical leaders that will move us forwards," he wrote.
"For now, as technology professionals, you can be proud of your response and your vital role in our national life."
