Why Resilience Is the New Mandate — A Year After the Worst Endpoint Outages

Around a year ago, everything broke. 

A simple, routine software update for trusted endpoint security software brought entire fleets down. 

Devices in restaurants, hospitals, airports, and warehouses went dark in an instant. It wasn’t a cyberattack or a hardware failure. It was just a rollout — executed at scale, without the safeguards to catch a critical mistake.

The CrowdStrike outage changed the conversation. Suddenly, teams that didn’t think twice about their update strategy were coming to us for advice on phased deployments, rollback plans, and telemetry. From my perspective, it was the first time they fully understood the risk baked into their device operations. 

Twelve months after this high-profile disruption, the industry has made tangible strides — but many organizations are still grappling with the same core challenge: How to deliver software safely at scale. The urgency to mature software deployment strategies has only grown, exposing wide gaps along what I call the DevOps maturity curve.

But in many ways, most of today’s teams are not where they’d like to be on the DevOps maturity curve, just as dedicated devices are more mission-critical than ever. So where does that leave your team today? Let’s break down what DevOps maturity really looks like — and what it takes to reach the top of the curve.

The DevOps Maturity Curve — Where Are You?

We talk about DevOps workflows, an idea that has existed for cloud applications since the 2000s, but has yet to fully proliferate for edge teams, because we’ve seen how they can be leveraged to support more successful updates and enhanced security. But not every organization is starting from the same place. 

The bottom of the curve: Overworked and unsecured

For teams at the bottom of the maturity curve, the risks have yet to fully sink in. These teams might have the skills, but they usually lack the processes, culture, and tools to manage their fleets efficiently, making downtime high and updates manual, unplanned, and sporadic. 

These teams may be managing smaller fleets, cut costs by using off-the-shelf hardware and OS, and use basic monitoring and only occasional app deployment, with siloed development and operations teams. The risks of devices falling out of compliance is high, which means that, while security might be a priority, patches aren’t always applied in a timely manner. 

These teams are usually stressed, overworked, with the weight of security breaches and downtime for mission-critical devices on their shoulders. IT ops is often found triaging and troubleshooting critical devices that are already down (or worse, breached), and in a worst-case scenario, overworked teams start pointing fingers. 

The middle of the curve: Scripting and device hierarchies enter the picture

For others, the mindset is there: Developers and operations work in concert to secure, troubleshoot, and monitor their fleets, but the tools they’re using have yet to meet them halfway. 

These teams have built scripts to streamline the device management processes, building out device groups and hierarchies to help manage and stagger rollouts, or are beginning to integrate testing workflows into their deployment process.

But for them, basic monitoring and telemetry can only go so far — which means they’re still found in a reactive state: Troubleshooting and remediating device outages while updates remain brittle and sporadic. They may expect and plan for things to go wrong, but they don’t have the full resources to identify bugs or and rollback updates should a problem arise. 

Top of the Curve: Tools, Process, & Pipelines

In my best guess, 10% of teams are at the top of the DevOps maturity curve. What does it look like up there? It’s streamlined workflows with proactive monitoring and alerts — notifying (and auto-remediating) when devices drift out of policy, not out of service. And it’s having robust automation and granular device groups to manage devices by type, operating systems, and geographic locations. 

With advanced toolsets, these teams have more time and can adopt better processes to enable thorough testing, methodical software rollouts and staging, with continuous monitoring after everything goes live. This all leads to continuous DevOps pipelines at the edge. 

From the outside observer, teams at the top of the DevOps maturity model may seem like they’re innovating at a rapid pace. It may look like problems don’t exist. In reality, they’re embracing thought-through, steady workflows, not rushed updates. They’re already assuming they have problems and use tools to spot them early. They actively monitor for errors and fix them fast or roll back updates to keep everything working smoothly. They’re steady, less stressed, and always improving. 

DevOps Maturity 

Right now, as teams work toward DevOps maturity, we’re also seeing a massive shift in what we expect our edge devices to do. Fleets are growing rapidly, AI is making its way to the edge, and our devices are more mission-critical than ever. 

This has ushered in a key realization: Endpoint software deployment isn’t just an IT concern — it’s a business continuity imperative. Whether you’re running self-service kiosks, patient check-in tablets, or frontline retail devices, the risks aren’t in software bugs — or even data leaks. The risk is operational paralysis.

It’s making resilient deployment a board-level concern in many industries. The question isn’t if another incident will occur—it’s when, and how gracefully your systems can recover. 

It’s clear that companies that invest in DevOps processes and tools will be more scalable, innovate faster today, and avoid catastrophic downtime tomorrow. The goal of DevOps maturity isn’t perfection — it’s predictability. That’s what makes a modern DevOps approach to device software deployment not just nice to have, but mission-critical.

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