CrowdStrike Falcon Platform Supports Google Cloud's ARM-Based Axion CPUs

CrowdStrike is proud to announce cloud security support for Google Cloud’s first custom ARM-based processor, Axion, delivered by the unified, cloud-native CrowdStrike Falcon® platform. This extends industry-leading protection to our customers with extensive coverage for Google Cloud environments.

We are excited to collaborate with Google Cloud, which today unveils its new C4A Virtual Machines. Based on Google Cloud’s ARM-based Axion CPUs, these new processors are purpose-built for high-performance computing and enhanced energy efficiency. 

Through this partnership, CrowdStrike helps ensure teams can optimize their infrastructure costs and resource consumption, and maintain high performance, without compromising on security. The Falcon platform delivers comprehensive cloud attack surface reduction and real-time cloud threat detection and protection across Axion-based workloads — all on a single agent. 

Addressing Today’s Changing IT Landscape

General-purpose compute is and will remain a critical portion of our customers’ IT infrastructure. In today’s rapidly evolving cloud landscape, organizations demand greater performance, scalability and cost-efficiency — especially with the amount of compute power required for modern analytics, information retrieval and ML training and serving. Google Cloud’s Axion CPUs offer better performance than the fastest general-purpose ARM-based instances available in the cloud today and better energy efficiency than comparable current-generation x86-based instances, making them ideal for modern cloud environments. 

However, as organizations adopt this architecture, it's crucial that security solutions do not diminish these benefits by adding excessive overhead or complexity. Although agentless-only approaches may seem appealing in this case, they typically only take snapshots of cloud risk once or twice per day. CrowdStrike delivers 24/7 continuous visibility coverage and real-time insight, which are essential to stopping breaches. With CrowdStrike Falcon, customers can expect lightweight, seamless protection for Axion-based workloads, ensuring security remains robust without compromising performance gains. 

Securing Axion-Based Workloads

Cloud adoption has revolutionized how we do business, but it has also opened new frontiers for adversaries. The numbers are staggering: Cloud breaches increased 75% year-over-year in 2023, according to the CrowdStrike 2024 Global Threat Report. The report highlights a shift in the threat landscape, in which adversaries are expanding their targets to include new, more complex attack surfaces such as applications, data services and AI models.

The Axion processor is designed to handle resource-demanding cloud workloads, making it attractive for critical enterprise applications. This increases the stakes for security, as high-value workloads — such as sensitive data processing, AI/ML workloads or databases — are often prime targets for cyberattacks.

This rapidly evolving environment demands a unified, intelligent approach that can keep pace with modern attacks. Traditional security tools, often fragmented and disconnected, simply can’t offer the comprehensive visibility and swift response that security teams need. We’ve made strategic moves to build a platform that doesn’t just detect threats but also provides a level of business and threat context that can sufficiently inform response decisions. 

CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security is a comprehensive CNAPP that delivers unified, end-to-end visibility and threat protection across cloud infrastructure, applications, data and AI models. Additionally, Falcon Cloud Security features advanced cloud detection and response (CDR) to identify and mitigate risks in real time, backed by high-fidelity threat intelligence that empowers teams to make faster, more informed prioritized decisions. 

Security that Optimizes for Performance and Efficiency

CrowdStrike is helping customers unlock the full potential of their infrastructure investments by implementing the solutions designed to help them innovate and scale in a secure manner. We are excited to be working closely with the Google Cloud ecosystem to bring the following benefits to our customers:

• Seamless Scalability: As Axion-powered workloads scale, so does our protection. Whether you’re running small-scale applications or extensive, distributed workloads, CrowdStrike Falcon keeps you secure with one single agent and a unified platform.
• Optimized for Performance: The CrowdStrike Falcon platform is built on a lightweight architecture designed to run in the background efficiently without heavily impacting system performance. It typically consumes less than 1-2% of CPU resources, preserving the inherent performance benefits of Google Cloud Axion CPUs. This is due to its cloud-first architecture, which offloads much of the data processing to CrowdStrike’s cloud infrastructure. 
• Uncompromising Security: Armed with the industry’s only unified intelligence and hunting team, CrowdStrike Counter Adversary Operations, CrowdStrike Falcon is able to provide a breadth of indicators of attack (IOAs) and indicators of misconfiguration (IOMs) to help sift the true positives from the noise.
• Efficiency Meets Security: The cost-efficiency of Google Cloud Axion CPUs pairs perfectly with CrowdStrike’s approach to licensing. CrowdStrike offers better cost predictability by not charging for each individual scan.

CrowdStrike Falcon can help provide comprehensive security for organizations looking to protect their Axion-based workloads and help solve the most complex challenges when it comes to balancing infrastructure performance and efficiency with security. 

Additional Resources

• Learn how Falcon Cloud Security can protect your Google Cloud resources.
• See why Forrester named CrowdStrike a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Workload Security, Q1 2024.
• Get a free Cloud Security Health Check and experience Falcon Cloud Security in action for yourself.