CrowdStrike CEO: Resilience Efforts, ‘Incredible Partners’ Key To Rebound Over Past Year

Just ahead of the one-year anniversary of the global IT outage caused by a faulty update from the vendor, CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz and President Michael Sentonas highlighted efforts at ‘advancing resilience across our platform’ as well as plans to hire a chief resilience officer.

CrowdStrike has emerged from the global IT outage caused by a faulty update as a “stronger company” thanks to extensive work to boost the resilience of its cybersecurity platform along with the efforts of its “incredible partners,” CrowdStrike Co-founder and CEO George Kurtz wrote in LinkedIn post Monday.

The post from Kurtz and a blog from CrowdStrike President Michael Sentonas were published just ahead of the one-year anniversary of the widely felt Microsoft Windows outage. The defective configuration update on July 19, 2024, led to global disruptions to air travel, health care and business, and experts have called it the largest IT outage of all time.

The posts Monday from Kurtz and Sentonas outlined the series of actions taken by CrowdStrike over the past year to address the issues that led to the incident, while also going further by seeking to build greater overall resilience into the vendor’s cybersecurity platform.

“Over the past year, we’ve focused deeply on advancing resilience across our platform and the company,” Sentonas wrote.

This has included introducing Sensor Self-Recovery, a capability that can automatically shift systems into safe mode when a crash loop is detected, as well as a new ring-based Content Distribution System.

CrowdStrike has also given customers greater control over deployment of security configuration updates to their environments and has established a dedicated Digital Operations Center that gives the company “deeper visibility and faster response across millions of sensors worldwide,” Sentonas wrote.

Additionally, quality control processes have been improved with the introduction of CrowdStrike’s Falcon Super Lab, while the vendor’s sensor hardening initiatives “proactively identify and prevent potential failures before they impact customers,” he wrote.

Looking ahead, CrowdStrike plans to hire a new C-suite executive, a chief resilience officer, who “will help shape how we build, operate, and lead across engineering, operations, and the business,” Sentonas wrote. The chief resilience officer will report to Kurtz and will be announced “soon,” he wrote.

“We expect more companies will make moves like this in the future to ensure that business resilience is owned at the highest levels,” Sentonas wrote.

In his LinkedIn post, Kurtz said that the moves by CrowdStrike over the past year have resulted in “greater resilience across our ecosystem” while also helping to “advance industry standards for cybersecurity.”

Kurtz thanked customers — who demonstrated “enduring trust” even through the difficulties — as well as CrowdStrike partners. “To our incredible partners who stood by us and rolled up their sleeves, thank you for being our extended family,” he wrote in the post.

Ultimately, “we’re a stronger company today than we were a year ago,” Kurtz wrote. “And we’re moving forward: stronger, smarter, and even more committed than ever.”

Earlier this month, a prominent Wall Street analyst disclosed that CrowdStrike is seeing “increased momentum” in its business, providing another indicator that the company has moved well beyond the outage of a year ago.

In a July 3 note to investors, Daniel Ives, managing director and senior equity research analyst at Wedbush Securities, wrote that CrowdStrike “remains the gold standard for cybersecurity” judging by recent surveys of customers showing strong traction.

To a large degree, the recovery process following the outage was made possible by the rapid response of many solution and service provider partners, Kurtz said last fall in response to questions from CRN editors during the 2024 XChange Best of Breed Conference.

“I think even our relationships with our partners are stronger because of this,” he said during the conference, hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company in October 2024. “I think when you hit some adversity, that’s really when you see the level of partnership, the engagement and the commitment that partners and customers have with CrowdStrike.”