What happened down the line of fire alarms
Here is the hot take you already ignored 17 times this week: a cyberattack hit OnSolve CodeRED, the emergency alert platform that supposedly speaks to every police department, fire squad, and local government with the gravitas of a bacon-wopping siren. The result? Nationwide disruptions to critical alert systems. People who rely on these checks to know when to evacuate their homes, or when to stop evacuating their homes, were left staring at static worse than a vendor roadmap. Yes, this happened to a service that exists to tell you to take shelter in a storm, and the outage happened anyway. You’d think the vendor would have redundant paths, but apparently not. Read more at the link below if you want the gruesome detail of how a single third-party blip can turn a public safety tool into a pumpkin at midnight.
Why this matters more than your budget cycle
Let’s cut to the chase—security is not a checkbox you tick after you post a press release. It is a practice, except in our industry where it’s mostly a marketing slide deck. The OnSolve outage exposes a fundamental truth C-suite folks never want to admit: critical services rely on third-party ecosystems the way a whiskey glass relies on glass. When the vendor is the system, you are choosing risk by delegation, and delegation is not insurance. CISOs watch vendors parade around with compliance certifications like ringmasters at a circus, while the actual control surfaces stay roped off with vendor-speak. The result is patience wearing thin, and budgets spent on more vendors who promise to solve the problem of vendors. Spoiler alert: they don’t.
Lessons learned worth sharing while you refill your glass
First, redundancy is not optional when the system you depend on is not you. If your alerting depends entirely on a single vendor, you are drinking the same Kool-Aid as the vendor’s marketing team. Build independent channels for emergencies, even if it means using a parallel, locally managed alert system for true public safety. Second, incident response cannot pretendingly begin at the moment of impact. It must start the moment you sign the contract. Automations, runbooks, and failover drills should be as common as coffee—preferably with a whiskey chaser after the meeting where you admit that the third-party risk posture is a joke. Third, if you must work with vendors, insist on clearer accountability, end-to-end visibility, and explicit service level agreements that survive the vendor’s fancy slides. And yes, I know the vendor lobbyists will gnash their teeth—but your people’s safety depends on it, not your quarterly earnings breathtakingly inflated by vendor certifications.
Bottom line from the bar-stool pundit
Pour yourself a drink, this outage is a blunt reminder that security is not a feature in a brochure. It is a continuous discipline that requires real controls, real redundancy, and less blind faith in third-party hype. If you are a reader who has already ignored the last ten warnings about supply chain risk, you deserve a generous pour of rye—for courage, or perhaps for denial. The emergency alert system is supposed to be a lifeline, not a marketing demo. Until we fix the vendor dependency problem, expect more nights where the siren blares in your inbox and you realize the only thing that actually works is the whiskey you poured to pretend it all makes sense.
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