CrowdStrike Journey to Top of Cyber World

CrowdStrike has become a leading independent security firm just in 10 years. With over $2 billion in annual recurring revenue, nearly 60% annual recurring revenue growth, and nearly $40 billion market capitalization. Above all the brighter part is joining Palo Alto Networks as a gold-standard pure-play cybersecurity firm.

Crowdstrike has achieved this with an architecture that enables it to go beyond point products. With acquisitions it’s journey to the top of cyber world is impressive.

CrowdStrike believes that the unstoppable breach is a myth. The mission to consolidate the patchwork of point solutions in the security market. CrowdStrike has more than 20 modules that span a range of capabilities. By integrating them in to one platform, Crowdstrike achieves the required height.

There are a few critical aspects of the CrowdStrike architecture that bear mentioning.

Agent/sensor

CrowdStrike’s lightweight agent is fundamental. A powerful but small, easy-to-install and unobtrusive agent is advantageous because it supports multiple CrowdStrike modules and can support massive scale.

Cloud By Default

The second key point is CrowdStrike, getting all telemetry data into the cloud so it can be analyzed. The more agents CrowdStrike installations around the world, the more data it has access to and the better its intelligence.

Threat graph

CrowdStrike has developed a purpose-built threat graph and analytics platform that allows it to quickly ingest, in near real time, key telemetry data and detect not only known threats but using machine intelligence, unknown malware and other potentially malicious behavior using indicators of attack or IoAs.

New products and modules beyond endpoint

The emerging segment is becoming a meaningful component of CrowdStrike’s business and is a key to consolidating the installed base of point products in the market. These new modules include Falcon Discover, which keeps track of systems, application usage and user accounts; Spotlight, which highlights vulnerabilities; and Identity Protection, designed to monitor and protect against identify attacks.

By bundling the capability of acquired companies like Humio, Preempt Security into Falcon, CrowdStrike’s hope is to provide better scale with its cloud architecture, simplify the deployment and management of the system and feed more data into its platform.

CrowdStrike’s three-pronged approach

CrowdStrike combines three “superpowers” in its platform:

• AV: Next-generation antivirus – it’s SaaS based solution and can do fast lookups to telemetry data in the cloud leveraging  CrowdStrike’s proprietary threat graph;
• EDR: Best-in-class endpoint detection and response. CrowdStrike sends all endpoint activity to the cloud and can process the data in near real time. CrowdStrike EDR allows you to search data history and it partners with threat intelligence platforms that push data into the CrowdStrike cloud, which increase its intelligence. CrowdStrike EDR has containment capabilities to fence off compromised systems.
• Managed Threat hunting: CrowdStrike has a world-class managed hunting team. It has a crack group of experts watching for threats. CrowdStrike’s advantage is the amount of data and near real time capabilities of its architecture.

CrowdStrike leverages all the advantages of the cloud and doesn’t fork its data set by keeping cloud as a default. The more agents CrowdStrike customers install, the better information CrowdStrike has to support its customers and the virtuous cycle continues.