Partner POV | Why Customers Are Consolidating Cybersecurity with CrowdStrike

Article written and contributed by Anne Aarness, Director of Product Marketing, CrowdStrike. 

As adversaries continue to evolve their tactics and techniques, organizations are scrambling to shore up their security posture. Security teams have historically turned to point products to fill gaps in their defenses, driving the issue of tool sprawl: The average enterprise deploys 45 cybersecurity-related tools, according to the Ponemon Institute.

When it comes to security, more tools often create more problems. Point products are rarely integrated, even when they come from the same vendor. This lack of integration creates blind spots that adversaries can exploit and makes it harder for organizations to detect attacks.

To uncover threats, analysts juggling myriad products are forced to bounce between disjointed tools to piece together event context during investigations — a tedious process that eats up valuable time. With eCrime breakout time down to 84 minutes in 2022, any time spent toggling between consoles and piecing information together is more time for the adversary to achieve their goals.

Tool sprawl creates operational challenges as well, as separate tools burden operations with parallel contracting, deployment and update timelines. Moreover, the more tools you have, the more experts you need to run them, exacerbating hiring challenges. 

Complexity is also the enemy of budgets. Organizations want fewer point products, fewer agents and fewer technologies that consume fewer resources. They want to spend less on licensing costs and realize a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for their security strategy, which includes infrastructure, implementation, training, maintenance, staffing and more.  

For all of these reasons, cybersecurity consolidation is in full swing, a trend fueled by the availability of security platforms that allow organizations to eliminate point products and achieve better security outcomes with lower cost and complexity. In 2022, a full 75% of organizations were pursuing security vendor consolidation.

The Falcon Platform: Complete Protection

Over the past few months, I've personally met with many customers, prospects and partners. Our conversations all centered on the same topic: how customers can consolidate their security stack to improve cost efficiencies while unlocking new capabilities — without sacrificing security and their ability to stop breaches.

The CrowdStrike Falcon® platform provides a unified agent-based and agentless approach: One intelligent, lightweight agent consolidates the capabilities of point products to stop advanced attacks. And when an agent can't be installed, an agentless approach provides full visibility into cloud workloads. 

What's most notable about the Falcon platform is how it delivers more value than the sum of its individual modules. Here's why customers are consolidating with the Falcon platform. 

1. Better security: Stop breaches 

Often, when a point product detects suspicious activity, it rarely has the context needed to trigger an automated remediation. And with adversaries getting better at blending in with benign behavior, the best you can hope for with most solutions is an alert to manually triage. More commonly, however, adversaries slip between the cracks in point products, leading to breaches.

The Falcon platform correlates activities across endpoints, workloads, data and identities, then maps it back to known MITRE ATTACK® tactics and techniques to assemble a holistic picture of adversary activity and stop attacks earlier in the kill chain. Customers, partners and analysts alike recognize the power of Falcon to provide the best-in-class detection coverage on the market.

2. Operational efficiency 

Customers want to replace point products with security platforms that are easy to deploy and manage. When vendors stitch together capabilities through mergers and acquisitions, there's often a lack of integration that results in multiple agents and consoles, which in turn leads to security gaps, employee burnout and slower response times.

With the Falcon platform, customers get a unified, cloud-native architecture built from the ground up to integrate capabilities and deliver powerful protection across all key attack surfaces. All platform capabilities are delivered via one lightweight agent that extends across on-premises and remote deployments, as well as cloud workloads, with minimal impact on performance. Customers get one command console for all capabilities, allowing analysts of all skill levels to make fast and intelligent decisions. 

3. Cost savings

One obvious benefit of cybersecurity consolidation is cost savings in the form of fewer licenses. But consider the less obvious benefits. For one, security platforms generally require fewer people to operate them compared to point products. You can also hire more entry-level staff and spend less time training them when your platform is easy to use. When viewed through the lens of a widening cybersecurity skills gap, a security platform that delivers better outcomes with fewer people is exactly what businesses need right now.

Further down the value chain, there's enormous benefit in closing gaps in your security system, helping you stop breaches and avoid the costs and reputational damage related to them. This is another area where an integrated platform adds tremendous value. 

The business imperative of cybersecurity consolidation is crucial at a time when budgets are tightening. Businesses are accelerating their standardization on trusted platforms that deliver immediate ROI and lower TCO. In Q1 2023, 50% more customers adopted the Falcon platform with eight or more modules compared to the previous year, highlighting the increasing customer demand for consolidation using Falcon.

Customers that Consolidated with CrowdStrike

Here are a few recent examples of companies using CrowdStrike to consolidate while improving their cybersecurity outcomes. 

CoreWeave

CoreWeave is a specialized cloud provider that offers a high-performance, fully managed, Kubernetes-native cloud platform. When CISO Matt Bellingeri wanted to extend protections from endpoints to cloud workloads, he chose the Falcon platform.

"Having a single pane of glass for all our security tools is huge for us," said Bellingeri. "The fact that we can go right to the CrowdStrike Store, enable a 30-day trial for any module and deploy it within minutes drastically reduces our time-to-value." 

Anywhere Real Estate

In the wake of a security incident, Anywhere Real Estate wanted to sunset its legacy security tools. Not only were they insufficient against advanced attacks, they contained multiple agents competing for CPU and memory. By consolidating to the Falcon platform, Anywhere gets a single lightweight agent for modern endpoint security, plus CrowdStrike® Falcon OverWatch™ for managed threat hunting at a price they can afford.

"From a productivity and efficiency standpoint, there's tremendous value in consolidating with the Falcon platform," said Anywhere Deputy CISO Brett Fernicola. 

Mercury Financial

Mercury Financial wanted to consolidate its security stack with a single platform to protect endpoints, cloud and workloads. After testing several solutions, the company chose the Falcon platform. Now, Mercury has a single interface to protect its entire IT infrastructure, including AWS and Azure cloud environments.