Toyota Motor Company Australia rebuilt its IT environment after a 2019 cyber attack without the aid of a central list of all its IT assets and how they were interconnected, because the system used to hold that data was "vanilla" and incomplete.
IT infrastructure manager Michael Mirabito told ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2021 conference that the carmaker was in the process of rebuilding its IT helpdesk systems and configuration management database (CMDB) when the attackers struck.
The impetus for rebuilding IT service management (ITSM) systems came years earlier.
When Toyota closed its Australian manufacturing operations in late 2017, it also moved its IT support “from more of an insourced type model to an outsourced model,” Mirabito said.
A managed services provider was appointed that used its own proprietary - but basic - ticketing system.
Toyota decided not to renew the contract, and appointed another provider in their place.
“The old vendor wasn’t happy about not renewing the contract and it was a very quick exodus,” Mirabito said.
“They refused to stay longer than two to three months, and it was pretty much, 'That's it. We're gone at this point, whether you like it or not'.”
At that point, Toyota decided to stand up its own ITSM platform in ServiceNow, but with only three months, which fell over year-end holidays, the company had to “make some pretty difficult decisions … on what was critical and essential” functionality, and what had to be skipped.
“The best way for me to describe [the result was] a very 'vanilla' build - very plain, very, very basic,” Mirabito said.
The CMDB - which acts as a central list of IT assets a ..
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