When Clouds Go Dark: A Serious Look at CrowdStrike's Outage and the Fortitude of Cloud Security

With the rising adoption of cloud technology, we witness an upward trend toward reliance on cloud-based security services. With cloud-based services, the need arises to safeguard sensitive data, applications, and infrastructure from cyberattacks. The recent CrowdStrike outage on July 19, 2024, propels all security enthusiasts to re-evaluate organizations’ practices and deployment procedures. This research paper dives into understanding the nature of cloud security and its extension beyond practices, technologies, policies, and measures that are established to create a safety net for cloud environments. How the event of an outage impacted industries like airlines and emergency services only outlines the need for enhancing frameworks that could quantitatively measure overall resilience maturity. This study emphasizes the need for and importance of continuous assessment and renewal of standards and guidelines for cloud security assessments that are agnostic of any complexity so that organizations can make informed decisions. The analysis of the CrowdStrike outage presents the current state of the effectiveness of current security measures, the applicability of resilience frameworks, and the preparedness of cloud-based security services to withstand and recover from cyber incidents. With its findings, the study aims to contribute to recommendations for security strategies and cloud service resilience against threats.