The CrowdStrike® “Vision” video features Co-founders George Kurtz, CEO, and Dmitri Alperovitch, CTO, offering a look at the driving forces that led them to create CrowdStrike beginning with their realization that an entirely new approach to endpoint security was needed. This blog focuses on Kurtz as he talks about what compelled him and Alperovitch to embark on this path and why cloud-native architecture was and remains paramount to realizing their objectives.
The second blog will focus on Alperovitch, who takes us on a deep dive into the unique and innovative technology behind the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform. Both founders discuss CrowdStrike’s unwavering commitment to safeguarding customers against today’s most complex and sophisticated threats. As Kurtz likes to say, “We don’t have a mission statement, we’re on a mission to stop breaches.”
Table of Contents
Filling an Industry Need
Kurtz explains that both he and Alperovitch had leadership roles at a large antivirus company but were dissatisfied with what was happening in cybersecurity. They saw an industry mired in decades old on-premises, client-server architectures and relying on signature-based technologies that are only effective against previously known attacks. Kurtz says, “Together, we heard firsthand from companies how angry and upset they were with their security solutions, how difficult they were to deploy and how ineffective they were at stopping breaches.”
They also realized that these solutions could not operate at the scale, speed and versatility required to stop the breaches organizations were encountering. Kurtz explains, “We set out to create a modern endpoint security platform, one with a cloud-native architecture built from the ground up to stop breaches.” They knew that if they stayed with a legacy vendor, they wouldn’t be able to solve these deficiencies — he says, “We needed to start from scratch and so we founded CrowdStrike.”
Creating Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
Kurtz and Alperovitch had witnessed the transformative power of cloud-native architecture and were inspired by the successes of the SalesForce CRM cloud, the ServiceNow service management cloud and Workday’s HR cloud.
They envisioned a similar platform and sought to define a PaaS for the security industry — a “security cloud.” They also decided to focus on the endpoints, as Kurtz explains, “The real challenge in cybersecurity is preventing breaches on the endpoints. Reaching the endpoint is the goal of almost all cyberattacks because that’s where the sensitive data actually sits.”
Kurtz defines endpoints to include computers, servers, mobile and IOT devices and even virtual workloads. “The network perimeter is disappearing. More and more companies deploy workloads in the cloud and hybrid environments and they have large teams of remote employees all using their endpoints outside the corporate network. That means you have to protect every endpoint and workload individually, wherever it is, and the only effective way to do that is from the cloud,” he says.
He also addresses how the Falcon platform is expanding, “In early 2017, we had three modules. Today, we have increased that to 10 cloud modules, and we plan to add even more. Our modular approach allows CrowdStrike customers to pick and choose the precise level and type of protection they need,” he says.
The CrowdStrike Store
As proof of his commitment to a security cloud, Kurtz discusses the The CrowdStrike Store, which debuted earlier this year and is the first and only unified security cloud ecosystem of trusted third-party applications.
It allows partners and customers to create their own applications, leveraging the Falcon agent and the data collected by the CrowdStrike platform. “This open approach stands in stark contrast to many competitors who have limited APIs, and encourage a closed ecosystem. Because we identify and stop incidents before they become breaches, our customers can sleep well at night and focus on growing their business,” Kurtz says.
The Importance of 100 Percent Cloud-Native Architecture
Kurtz also discusses the advantages of being able to build the CrowdStrike Falcon platform from the ground up on cloud-native architecture. He says that the on-premise providers, who had dominated the market, had problems as they tried to add functionality — having to bolt on cloud capabilities with hosted and cloud-managed solutions.
He explains, “These offerings continue to be siloed, lack integration and possess limited scalability to identify threats in real time. As a result, companies suffered devastating breaches despite their investment in security solutions that kill productivity.”
With the Falcon platform, Kurtz and Alperovitch have solved those problems, Kurtz says, “We built a 100 percent cloud-native endpoint security platform. Our solution is rapidly deployable, easy to use and unlocks the power of crowdsourced data. It gets smarter the more data it consumes, increasing our intelligence, effectiveness and competitive advantage with each new customer and endpoint joining our crowdsourced network. We do all of this with one lightweight agent that is intelligent by design, frictionless to deploy and noninvasive to the end user.”
The CrowdStrike Mission
Kurtz closes the video by reiterating that CrowdStrike’s focus remains on stopping breaches. He says, “I couldn’t be prouder of our important mission, protecting our customers from devastating attacks, business disruption and the theft of IP and financial resources.”
Leave a Reply