Cloud outages are increasingly recognized as one of the most significant accumulation risks for the cyber insurance market. In the white paper "Understanding cloud outages: A framework for cyber insurance risk assessment", a cyber industry steering group comprising Axis, Gallagher Re, Moody’s and Munich Re explores how cloud infrastructure works, why outages occur, and what they mean for insurers, risk managers and businesses operating in an increasingly cloud-dependent economy.

As organisations continue to migrate critical operations to cloud environments, understanding the potential impact of cloud service disruptions has become essential. Drawing on technical expertise and insurance market insights, the paper provides a practical framework for understanding outage scenarios. 

What you'll find inside:

• Why cloud outages matter for cyber insurance: Understanding the growing accumulation risk posed by disruptions at hyperscale cloud service providers
• How cloud infrastructure is built: An introduction to data centers, availability zones, regions and the layered architecture that supports modern cloud services
• Different outage scenarios and failure modes: How disruptions can occur at product, data center or regional level, and why recovery times vary significantly
• The business interruption challenge: Why can the same cloud outage have very different impacts depending on a company's infrastructure design, dependencies and resilience measures
• A framework for risk assessment: Insights from cloud service provider status reports to help insurers better understand, categorize and evaluate cloud outage events

While cloud providers build highly resilient and redundant systems, no infrastructure is immune to failure. The complexity, scale and interconnected nature of cloud environments make outage scenarios difficult to predict and quantify. For insurers, this creates a unique challenge: understanding how technical failures can translate into financial losses across thousands of interconnected organizations.

At the same time, cloud outages highlight the importance of resilience. Organisations that invest in robust architecture, redundancy strategies and recovery planning are better positioned to minimize business interruption and strengthen operational continuity.