Security companies ForeScout and CrowdStrike say their new partnership will provide visibility, threat detection, and automated incident response across endpoints and the network.

ForeScout specializes in Internet of Things (IoT) security and network visibility. Its software discovers devices as they connect to the network, and then classifies the device according to its type and ownership. Based on this classification, it assesses the device security posture and allows organizations to set policies that determine what the device is allowed to do while connected to the network.

CrowdStrike’s threat analytics platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) to provide endpoint detection and response.

“They are good at finding and defending against threats in the endpoint. We’re very good at finding those threats in the network,” said Pedro Abreu, chief strategy officer at ForeScout. “Combining the visibility platform from ForeScout with the threat detection and endpoint protection capabilities from CrowdStrike allows us to more quickly respond to those threats and reduce the time from detection to response, which is critical.”

Through this partnership, the two companies will monitor threats, and extend protection and policy control to unmanaged bring-your-own-device (BYOD), guest, and IoT devices. They will also share threat intelligence and automate incident response to protect against malware targeting traditional devices such as mobile phones and servers, as well as IoT devices.

This is important as the number of connected devices is forecast to reach between 20 billion and 50 billion by 2020, and securing IoT devices is today a top security challenge. In a recent survey conducted by SDxCentral, 45 percent of respondents said difficulty securing these devices poses a major challenge to their organization.

In the future, ForeScout and CrowdStrike also plan to build a joint security product. “In parallel to the technology partnership, we’re working on more formalized integration between our two technologies to deliver value proposition out of the box,” Abreu said.

ForeScout has more than 70 technology and alliance partners. These partnerships and product integrations allow enterprises to eliminate security gaps and coordinate infrastructure-wide security management, according to the company.

Last month ForeScout partnered with CyberArk on a joint enterprise security product.

In June ForeScout partnered with VMware to improve visibility into NSX software-defined data centers as virtual machines (VMs) are created, moved, off-lined, or retired. NSX is VMware’s network virtualization technology.

Earlier this year, ForeScout extended its security monitoring to the public cloud, specifically to workloads running on Amazon Web Services (AWS).