Wednesday 

Room 7 

17:40 - 18:40 

(UTC+02

Talk (60 min)

Anatomy of an Incident (featuring CrowdStrike)

Back at NDC London 2022 I gave a talk about how to handle incidents (google: "youtube incident liam westley") providing a strategy for how to prepare for incidents, how they should be managed and how you talk to your customers. In July 2024, along came CrowdStrike, and our incident plan went into action, honed over the previous three years. In this session we will have a quick review of what an incident plan should look like. Then will move onto a timeline, taken from our Post Incident Review (PIR), of how that incident plan was put into action when CrowdStrike arrived, what worked (most of it) and how we have tweaked our incident plan for the future.

Liam Westley

Liam Westley is Head of Engineering at FreemarketFX, a fintech startup specializing in foreign currency trading, with a cloud native platform in Azure. He quite likes working near London Bridge as there is some fantastic food and coffee to be had within a few minutes walk.

Previous to FreemarketFX, Liam worked at Huddle just down the road in Aldgate helping the mobile and desktop teams create apps to play nicely with microservices. At Criteria MX, a digital media startup he worked as a consultant via his own company Tiger Computer Services Ltd, specialising in software for Broadcast Television. His Niagara SMS moderation system was used by QVC UK for eight years to display SMS messages from viewers, live, on screen. Liam is also responsible for the ticketing system for Hat Trick Productions which provides e-tickets to shows such as Have I Got News For You and Room 101.

Liam has worked for chellomedia, GMTV, BSkyB, SmashedAtom and Original Thinking Group. In his time he created the first in house weather system for Sky News using Visual Basic 1.0, acted as architect for two general election systems, project managed the launch of the GMTV web site, was key to delivering the first interactive television chat service in the UK for BSkyB and helped launch the first live shopping channels in the Netherlands.