If there is only one (albeit) small silver lining to Wednesday’s Australia-wide outage, it is that Bayer Rosmarin should have been able to learn from the mistakes made last year during the cyberattack.
The key to her response is communication – something that logic suggests should have come naturally to a communications company chief executive.
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During the cyberattack, a lack of regular disclosure to customers and the public created an information void – which politicians were eager to fill.
The government was ready with a sledgehammer – feeding off information from cyber experts who were convinced that Optus should shoulder some blame for its substandard fortification from attack, which made it vulnerable to cyber thieves.
Even now, we don’t really know whether Optus was culpable – it says it wasn’t. But the investigation report from Deloitte that would provide those answers was kept under wraps.
Optus has relied on legal professional privilege as a defence for not revealing the details, adding that it might also leave it vulnerable to future cyberattacks.
It should have thought of this when it indicated earlier that it would make the report public and when its chairman told shareholders that it would be transparent.
The absence of any even edited version of the Deloitte findings only serves to suggest that Optus didn’t like what was in the report.
What this week’s outage has demonstrated is that Optus was again tardy with timely information.
These crises are fluid so constant updates are important. Retail and commercial customers are at best disadvantaged every minute they are deprived of digital breath – at worst they are commercially crippled.
As Telstra chief in 2016, Andy Penn kept his position after a widespread outage. Credit:
As a community, many more than just customers were impacted as trains drew to a halt and some hospitals lost vital communications.
But in the early hours of the disaster, Bayer Rosmarin was hard to find, social media posts were brief and many of the customers couldn’t access them because they had no phone or internet connection.
In Optus’ defence, it wasn’t sure what had caused the problem or how long it would take to fix.
By the time Bayer Rosmarin took to commercial radio around lunchtime, she could proclaim the good news that services had begun being restored.
The question that now needs answering is whether this was a problem of Optus’ own making or just one of the perils faced in running a huge complex network. Has it invested sufficiently in its IT infrastructure?
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