FAIRFAX, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Verica, the company using Chaos Engineering to make systems more secure and less vulnerable to costly incidents, today announced the launch of The Verica Open Incident Database (the VOID). The VOID makes public incident reports available to everyone in a single place in order to generate new, stronger questions and community discussion about how to tackle software-based failures and outages.
The publication of software incident reports is scattered across the Internet—it’s often difficult to link directly to them, or they are sequestered in corners of company websites. They’re hard to find, and virtually impossible to compare and contrast in a structured way. Collecting these reports is critical since software has long moved on from hosting pictures of cats online to running transportation, infrastructure, power grids, healthcare devices, voting systems, autonomous vehicles, and many critical societal functions.
“By launching the VOID we are bringing the public more transparency and information sharing about software-based failures and outages,” said Courtney Nash, Senior Research Analyst at Verica. “By raising awareness and increasing public understanding of software related incidents, the project will make software and the internet safer and more resilient.”
The most surprising finding showed the mean time to resolve (MTTR), the industry gold standard for success and efficiency, proved to be an inaccurate metric due to the distribution of the data. Other findings include that only one quarter of incident reports took the time to identify the root cause and less than a percent studied near miss reports. These findings will require a paradigm shift in thinking about how to respond to and analyze incidents.
Launch partners for the VOID include Indeed, NS1, Adaptive Capacity Labs, Security Scorecard, and Auxon. Each will provide support to help fund the development, research and dissemination of knowledge generated from the VOID, as well as providing advice on the ongoing direction of the program.
The VOID contains more than just standard company post-mortems or status updates. The goal is to support a broader understanding of how individuals, companies, media, and others treat these types of events by collecting a set of meta-data.
“We’re thrilled to announce a project that increases transparency and information sharing about software-based failures and outages. Much in the same way that airline companies set aside competitive concerns in the late 90s to improve flight safety, the tech industry has an immense body of commoditized knowledge that it could share more broadly. This project begins the process of sharing this information in order to learn from each other, and push our industry forward while making what we build safer for everyone,” said Casey Rosenthal, co-founder & CEO, Verica.
Users can make the database more comprehensive by submitting any reports that aren’t included in the VOID with this short form. You can download the full report here.
About Verica
Verica uses Chaos Engineering to make systems more secure and less vulnerable to costly incidents. The next step in the evolution of Chaos Engineering through Continuous Verification, Verica uses as a platform to provide out-of-the-box verifications that proactively uncover system weaknesses and security flaws before they disrupt business outcomes. All companies running complex systems experience failure, but as systems become more complex, Verica will be there to help maintain confidence in those systems. With Verica, you can trust that your software is working how it’s meant to. Learn more at www.verica.io.
