Fal.Con 2024 – Resilient by Design

Our annual Fal.Con user conference is always one of the highlights of my year because it’s a chance to spend time with some of my favorite people: our customers and partners. This year’s event has special meaning for me as I reflect on all that’s happened since we last met as a community.

From the moment I arrived and started talking with so many of you — our customers, partners and dedicated users — I felt a sense of overwhelming gratitude. The support of our community is always welcome, but this year it’s especially poignant. Whether it was words of encouragement, your trust in the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform, or your unwavering belief in what we’re building together, you uplifted us in ways that truly matter. So I want to express it again here, for those who weren’t in attendance at my keynote presentation on Tuesday: Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

The excitement I witnessed at Fal.Con was tangible. It was as irrepressible as the global cybersecurity community itself. The fact alone that we far surpassed our attendance goals, stretching the capacity of this huge Las Vegas venue with more than 6,000 attendees, is a testament to the resilience and passion of these security professionals — the people who put the “crowd” in CrowdStrike.

It’s no coincidence that resilience was the main topic of my keynote and drove many of the conversations at Fal.Con. Society’s reliance on digital systems has become so vital and interconnected — and the need to fortify these connections across the global digital ecosystem has never been more urgent.

That’s why I introduced a new framework to address this issue systemically. Resilient by Design expands on the concepts of CISA’s Secure by Design to help ensure that our systems and companies are built to anticipate, withstand, adapt and recover from any disruption that might compromise security, operations or availability.

Extending CrowdStrike’s Mission

CrowdStrike will continue on its primary mission: stopping breaches. At the same time, recent events have made it clear that to achieve our objective consistently, we must also work to make sure every connected system is as robust as possible.

Resilient by Design is both a business framework and a mindset, and it requires commitment and resolve to succeed. It’s how we drive resilience across our ecosystem, while also helping our customers become more resilient.

First, it starts from within, by embedding the pillars of Resilient by Design into every CrowdStrike process and everything we do. Our focus is on creating the industry’s best technology to protect customers and stop breaches, as well as creating the most resilient solution.

Let me explain the three principal pillars of this program and how CrowdStrike is internalizing them:

1. Foundational: Simply put, resilience must be a foundational element of our company. Everything we do at CrowdStrike will have a lens on how we can enhance resilience. We have already shared many of the process improvements made in the past two months, and we continue in our commitment to strengthen every aspect of what we do, from code and deployment to configuration and support.
2. Adaptive: We need to be adaptive to our customer needs, to recognize that one size doesn’t fit all customers. Part of this involves focusing on the diverse needs of our customers’ industries — recognizing that finance is different from manufacturing, for example. Healthcare is different from utilities, and technology is different from government. By adapting what we do to address this diversity, we can build and deliver highly resilient security solutions and outcomes that fit the needs of our customers.
3. Continuous: There needs to be a perpetual feedback loop that enables constant learning and improvement. We want to incorporate what we learn from you, and from the industry, and make sure that’s built into our foundation. This continuous learning is already part of our DNA, if you consider how we leverage the power of the cloud and the crowd in the Falcon platform. We are constantly monitoring what’s in the environment, observing threats as they evolve, understanding the adversary’s tactics and techniques, learning from and adapting to their tradecraft. By focusing on continuous improvement across all of our business processes, we can create an ecosystem where these pillars support each other and become a virtuous cycle.

Our commitment to our customers means CrowdStrike must become a positive example of Resilient by Design. We are resolved to do exactly that.

Looking Ahead

As our customers expect — and rightfully demand from us — CrowdStrike will continue to innovate, collaborate and push the boundaries of digital defense, leading with purpose and determination. We are working alongside the very best — our customers, partners, industry leaders and government partners — to build a better, more secure and stable future.

To that end, I invited Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella to join me during my Fal.Con 2024 keynote. This historic collaboration might have once seemed unthinkable, but the stakes are simply too high for us to work in silos. The inextricable interconnection of our systems demands a unified, coordinated approach. Above all, working together is in the best interests of our customers.

Pursuing resilience is not optional — it’s essential for all of us. These principles will drive the next phase of growth for our company, our industry and the broader ecosystem on which we all depend. Resilient by Design guides us on our ultimate mission of stopping breaches.