CrowdStrike’s extended detection and response (XDR) push has been on a tear in recent months, with CEO and co-founder George Kurtz touting the company’s recent success outside of its traditional endpoint security during a recent earnings call.
“We achieved another record quarter for our identity protection modules, which significantly differentiates Falcon in the field and continue to lead to higher win rates,” Kurtz said.
CrowdStrike launched a managed identity service, dubbed Falcon Identity Threat Protection Complete. It integrates the Falcon Identity Threat Protection module with the Falcon Complete managed endpoint security service to help customers scale their security teams through expert management, monitoring, and remediation.
The service is designed to address the talent shortage in cybersecurity, Amol Kulkarni, chief product and engineering officer at CrowdStrike, told SDxCentral. It “is essentially providing for the first time managed detection and response service for identity protection as a full turnkey service so that customers don't have to stand up a program for identity protection on their own, and they can rely on CrowdStrike to be able to do that end to end.”
Kurtz also announced CrowdStrike’s technology partner Cloudflare adopted the Falcon Complete and Horizon cloud security posture management platforms last quarter to tackle increasing identity threat.
CrowdStrike Propels Frictionless Zero Trust JourneyTo enhance the identity protection capabilities, CrowdStrike also integrated the Identity Zero Trust module into its Falcon platform, which came from the vendor’s Preempt acquisition in 2020.
CrowdStrike’s zero-trust approach is to combine user identity and device or host risk profiles, then “make a dynamic decision whether to allow certain action to be taken or not,” Kulkarni explained. “We are in a unique place to have both visibility and understanding of users as well as devices, and those are the two critical ingredients for zero trust.”
Additionally, the vendor helps customers to make those decisions without having to modify existing services. “It is frictionless because it layers on top so you don't have to go and modify your existing service,” he said.
CrowdStrike recently announced a collaboration with Okta and Zscaler, alongside the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), to launch the Zero Trust Advancement Center and accelerate the deployment of zero trust industry standards.
CrowdStrike’s Cloud Security StackCloud security is another module in the Falcon platform, which covers runtime protection and cloud security posture management, Kurtz noted.
“They're integrated across our Falcon control plane, which makes it very effective,” he explained. “We also have the ability to identify indicators of attack, which is much different than just misconfigurations.”
CrowdStrike combines the visibility it receives from the agent and agentless systems into “a unified cloud security model … which will give far better protection” compared to companies that only offer either agent- or agentless-based services, Kulkarni said.
XDR is Still CrowdStrike’s Key FocusThis year, the security vendor plans to continue enriching its Security Cloud data fabric with additional telemetry and enhancing its IoT offerings for the Falcon platform, Kulkarni said. Plus, “XDR is another area of key focus and so is cloud security where we are continuing to shift left toward infrastructure-as-a-code and integrating with the developer lifecycle,” he added.
Last month, the vendor announced the general availability of its Falcon XDR module. It builds on CrowdStrike’s endpoint security product and also uses telemetry from third-party data from vendors including CrowdXDR Alliance partners. The module also uses Falcon Fusion, the vendor’s homegrown security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) framework to manage security workflows.
“What we are doing with XDR is really taking an open approach by what we've defined as the XDR Alliance, which is incorporating technologies across the security stack,” Kulkarni said.
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