Y2K and Infrastructure Resilience 25 Years LaterY2K and Infrastructure Resilience 25 Years Later

In 1999, under the digital gleam of Keanu Reeves in “The Matrix,” IT teams either sat confidently with the changes they made to resolve the Y2K bug or waited with bated breath to see if the fixes held.

The arrival of the year 2000 did not bring about the feared digital apocalypse thanks to fixes to make software and hardware to understand what seemed like a simple, yet crucial change to date formats.

Now, more than one generation later, IT infrastructure faces a menagerie of other potential risks that could bring about systemic disruptions -- some attributed to errors, others that stem from bad actors.

This episode of DOS Won’t Hunt saw Greg Rivera, vice president of product at CAST; Paul Davis, field CISO at JFrog; and Theresa Lanowitz, chief evangelist at LevelBlue, discuss how computer infrastructure evolved in the 25 years since worries about Y2K launched IT teams into action.

Are there rules and norms that were part of legacy tech from the Y2K era that no longer apply in the time of cloud, edge, and all else? Would the mass IT mobilization that happened to resolve Y2K be easier or harder to pull off today to address infrastructure issues? Did bad actors learn any tricks from Y2K for potential systemwide cyberattacks?