Real estate

An eye-opening experience: housing professionals respond to the global technological disruption

In mortgages and real estate, says Abhinav Asthana, head of product at Tavantsaid that most of its customers not only relied on the Microsoft system, but also on Amazon, Googling or their own private cloud systems, reducing their exposure to the outage.

This also applies to Tavant himself. According to Asthana, only a small percentage of the tech company’s employees rely on Windows systems, and the impact was not as relevant because they have virtual workspaces.

“That means if you can’t get a Windows machine, you get your replacement machine immediately, with a virtual workstation that gives you access to the same library where you can do your work,” Asthana said. “Of course you see a small contrast there with airlines, where the entire reservation system is on the Azure server.”

Asthana said Tavant is still “fixing problems with Windows machines” while taking staff away from them. “We can’t let people log into workspaces without endpoint protection. That is important to us,” he said.

Joining us on stage is Alisande Heriyanto, vice president of product and technical support The Corcoran Groupadded that Friday’s episode shows that “we shouldn’t put our eggs in one basket when it comes to any specific technology.”

Build versus buy

Several mortgage companies said they rely on internal technology to manage their processes and make their businesses less vulnerable to external problems. That is the case for United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM).

“I fully subscribe to the ‘build versus buy’ mentality. Not everyone can do that. But I second this mainly because I am a control freak,” Jason Bressler, chief technology officer at UWM, said on stage. “Ultimately, many of us want to control our own destiny. We don’t want to be dependent on other people.”

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“We miss people [at this conference] here because of the CrowdStrike problem. That was a very eye-opening experience. And there are all kinds of companies that are still affected by this,” Bressler added. “We were affected in exactly the same way because we use Microsoft as the back-end for our infrastructure. But because everything was in-house, we were able to recover within hours.”

Chris Cox, chief technology and digital officer at Keller Williamssaid that in the future, companies could use AI to “predict and prevent” events like the CrowdStrike outage.

The CEO of a mortgage technology provider who attended the AI ​​Summit said his teams in the US and India were still experiencing issues with Microsoft systems four days after the issue disrupted several sectors.

David Weston, vice president of enterprise and OS security at Microsoft, told customers in a statement about it Saturday that the company “worked around the clock and provided ongoing updates and support.”

“While software updates may occasionally cause outages, major incidents such as the
CrowdStrike events are not common,” Weston wrote. “We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update has affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than 1% of all Windows machines. While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impact reflects the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that perform many critical services.”

In the mortgage sector, the technical glitch caused some disruptions in certain core services, such as the Federal Housing Administration‘s (FHA) Connection portal, which provides FHA-approved lenders and business partners secure online access to computer systems on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

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ICE Mortgage Technologies also confirmed that the incident affected the Encompass loan system, while the Nationwide multi-state licensing system (NMLS) said it was “briefly impacted.” FHA, ICE and NMLS said their systems were restored Friday.

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