CrowdStrike has integrated their standalone Falcon Identity Threat Protection into their Falcon Complete MDR offering, and expects that the combination of Falcon Complete’s market strength plus customer demand for an identity service no one else yet offers will drive their identity solution to a market leadership position.
Today, cybersecurity vendor CrowdStrike is announcing a fully-managed identity threat protection solution, which combines the identity threat protection acquired with Preempt Security in 2020 with their Falcon Complete MDR [Managed Detection and Response] offering. The result is what the company is stressing is the first managed identity threat protection available in the industry.
“A lot of organizations are looking for a more managed identity capability and this is a first of its kind,” said Thomas Etheridge, senior vice president, services at CrowdStrike. “There is no MDR today in the market that offers managed identity protection.”
The identity protection capability is not new to CrowdStrike, but the ability to consume it as part of their MDR managed service is.
“We have an application that runs on our platform, Falcon Identity Threat Protection, which has been available since September 2020,” Etheridge indicated. “It has been a standalone product on the platform. Now, for the first time, it has been added into a managed service as an additional capability that customers are able to procure on top of our Falcon Complete MDR offering.”
Etheridge said that this new type of solution is very timely.
Thomas Etheridge, senior vice president, services, CrowdStrike
“A lot of the perimeters have expanded, and one of them has been identity,” he said. “We now see many incidents generated by stolen credentials, which at the same time remain persistent and often undetected in the organization. Over 80% of the threats found in our latest report come from stolen credentials This solution allows the Falcon Complete team to respond more quickly to these issues.”
The identity technology came from the 2020 acquisition of Preempt Security, and its technologies around identity and zero trust protection.
“We saw the need for identity telemetry when we do incident response, as well as having both on the front end,” Etheridge said. “It’s not just an integration with the Preempt technology. We engineered the capability and expanded it so we could do multiple things.”
First, he said it lets customers shrink their attack surface.
“It allows us to work with organizations to prevent unauthorized log-ins, compel the use of MFAs, and understand how critical resources are being used in an environment,” Etheridge stated.
Second will be the ability to stop identity-driven attacks in real time.
“Those countermeasures will be 24/7/365 deployable to shut down access when needed,” Etheridge said.
The third capability, and one that Etheridge emphasized as being really important, is visibility into things like authentication patterns and trends.
“That information is beneficial to organizations as they think about maturing,” he said. “The insights that this provides into visibility and privileges provides a lot of rich detail.”
Etheridge emphasized that even though CrowdStrike is a relative latecomer to the identity market, they expect to be able to leverage their MDR to drive the identity solution into a leadership position
“We are extraordinarily proud of our Falcon Complete line of business,” he said. “It is recognized as a very strong and complete MDR offering. Others don’t have the resources to response to identity threats in the time required, and still others don’t provide the protections or the technical expertise of our MDR. Microsoft makes Active Directory, but that doesn’t mean they have the expertise to help customers deploy and configure it moving forward. We are in a unique position there. Our identity protection offering will be first of our kind on the market and will drive us to the leadership position we have in the MDR space. This is why we think that it will get wide adoption.”
Etheridge also stressed that Falcon Identity Threat Protection Complete is more than just a technology solution.
“There’s a technology element, but it’s backed and supported by expertise, people and processes around the associated identity infrastructure of a customer’s environment, to better enable organizations to uplift and secure their overall security posture,” he said.
The vast majority of CrowdStrike’s sales go through channel partners, and Etheridge said adding identity into the MDR will open up new markets for them.
“It’s a great opportunity for partners who are looking to improve identity posture within customer environments,” he noted.
