CrowdStrike Acquisition Offers Customers Enhanced Security Capabilities - Identity Review - Identity Review | Global Tech Think Tank

In an effort to beef up their Zero Trust security, CrowdStrike, an American cybersecurity company, will be acquiring Preempt Security, a conditional access platform provider. Under the agreement, CrowdStrike expects to pay approximately $86 million in cash and $10 million in stock and options.

“One of the unique features that drew us to Preempt’s platform is its ability to meet the conditional access requirements of an organization without putting unnecessary burden on security staff. The technology detects identity-based attacks and unauthorized access attempts, allowing customers to block, notify, force re-authentication or challenge the user with multi-factor authentication,” said George Kurtz, CrowdStrike co-founder and chief executive officer.

Hybrid Working Environment Creating Greater Need for Security 

As of April 2020, two-thirds of employees are currently working remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In light of the potential for increased productivity and cost-saving, many predict that this shift is here to stay for the foreseeable future. 

The impacts of this change have been long-ranging and for companies, one of the effects of this is increased security vulnerability. “In 2020, we saw a rapid shift to digital transformation, accelerating the adoption of cloud technologies across industries,” said Kurtz. “This secular technology trend has increased the opportunities for targeted attacks, presenting security teams with a complex set of challenges rooted in disparate systems and data, a wider range of managed and unmanaged endpoints and identities, and end-user access to hundreds of personal and business applications required for everyday work.”

The Zero Trust Framework

CrowdStrike hopes that with this acquisition that they can be a part of the solution for many companies by offering them end-to-end protection. Specifically, CrowdStrike aims to offer a modern Zero Trust security architecture through integration with Preempt Security’s technologies.

Zero Trust is an information security framework that states that organizations should not trust any entity inside or outside of their network perimeter at any time, meaning any incoming or outgoing traffic must be scrutinized. The difference between this and other security models is that even internal traffic, meaning traffic that doesn’t cross the perimeter of the organization, must be treated as a potential danger. The goal of a Zero Trust configuration is to restrict access to vulnerable company materials on a need-to-know basis.

According to a Forrester report, the need to establish a modern Zero Trust security environment has never been greater. This is due to COVID-19 leading to “the loss of a physical perimeter in protecting applications and data from external and internal threats.”

However, this environment does come with its challenges. It is by no means easy to offer such complete coverage for many different users, devices, applications, and ways to access and store data. Yet, Ajit Sancheti, Preempt’s co-founder, is confident that they can do it: “Combining Preempt’s identity security expertise with CrowdStrike’s incredible scale and threat telemetry, we will be able to offer customers complete protection for hybrid workloads and remote workforces wherever they are.”

ABOUT THE WRITER

Sarah Raza is a Tech Innovation Fellow with a background in computer science from Stanford. She is passionate about exploring the implications of increased usage of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

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