Microsoft CrowdStrike Outage: Navigating the Top Three Risks of Cloud Dependence

Today, cloud computing has become the backbone of modern business operations. Companies across the globe rely on cloud services for computing, networking, storage, cybersecurity, and their day-to-day operations. However, the outage involving Microsoft and CrowdStrike has underscored vulnerabilities and risks associated with dependence on the cloud.

The incident

Around 6:00 PM ET on Thursday, July 18, Microsoft experienced a significant cloud service disruption that affected thousands of businesses worldwide. The outage, which lasted several hours, was attributed to a combination of technical failures involving a third-party provider, CrowdStrike, within the cloud infrastructure. As a result, many organizations found themselves without critical cloud-based services, causing widespread disruption and highlighting the fragility of our interconnected digital ecosystem.

The Microsoft outage serves as a stark reminder of the risks associated with heavy reliance on cloud services. Here are three key concerns:

1. Single point of failure

Cloud providers, despite their robust infrastructure, can become single points of failure. When a major provider experiences an outage, the ripple effects can be far-reaching, impacting a cascade of clients and services.

2. Operational disruptions

For many businesses such as an airline or retailer, cloud services are integral to daily operations. An outage can halt business processes, disrupt customer access, and lead to significant financial losses. Relying on the cloud for business critical applications means that any disruption can have immediate and severe consequences on productivity and revenue.

3. Connected experience

While cloud adoption increases, network operations teams struggle to contend with visibility gaps posed by the cloud services their organizations have adopted. This lack of visibility results in wasted time and resources as teams spend significant time trying to resolve application and network performance issues. Lengthy troubleshooting prevents network operations teams from spending time on more valuable strategic initiatives. Ultimately, this lack of visibility presents increased risk to the business.

Mitigating the risks

While cloud services offer numerous benefits, organizations must mitigate the associated risks through comprehensive planning and strategy. Adopting a multi-cloud strategy can reduce reliance on a single provider. By distributing application workloads across multiple cloud platforms, businesses can enhance redundancy and minimize the impact of a single provider’s outage.

Understanding when a service has an outage or is underperforming, however, is only useful if operational teams can determine whether their organization is affected. When performance issues arise in applications hosted partially or fully in the cloud, and these issues can’t immediately be explained by cloud outages, most enterprises initiate a “war room” style response. This means members of disparate network operations, security operations, and development teams have to come together to identify the root cause of an issue.

Monitoring hybrid infrastructures consisting of internal computing resources, PaaS, and SaaS introduces increased complexity. Network operations teams must typically contend first with so-called “north-south” dependencies. These dependencies are associated with scenarios in which users are accessing applications or services that are located in the cloud. Though, as multi-cloud becomes mainstream, teams must also contend with managing network connections between different cloud environments, which is referred to as “east-west” traffic. In either case, the NOC is often involved in troubleshooting issues that arise.

Network teams will need to provide complete, end-to-end visibility for all the different ways organizations rely upon access to the cloud. This requires solutions that can track data center-to-cloud connections, region-to-region transmissions within a single cloud provider, and cloud-to-cloud connections in multi-cloud environments. In addition, in cases where cloud resources are integrated with external SaaS offerings, tracking cloud-to-SaaS connections is a must.

Conclusion

The latest July 2024 Microsoft outage has illuminated the vulnerabilities inherent in business reliance on cloud services. While the cloud offers unparalleled convenience and scalability, it also brings significant risks that must be proactively managed.

By adopting strategies to mitigate these risks, businesses can safeguard their operations and ensure resilience in the face of future disruptions. The key lies in a balanced approach that leverages the strengths of the cloud while preparing for its potential pitfalls.

Learn about active monitoring and how to achieve cloud transformation success with enhanced network visibility on our cloud transformation solution page.