CrowdStrike Named a Strong Performer in 2022 Forrester Wave for Cloud Workload Security

“In its current CWS offering, the vendor has great CSPM capabilities for Azure, including detecting overprivileged admins and enforcing storage least privilege and encryption, virtual machine, and network policy controls.” – The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Workload Security, Q1 2022

 

CrowdStrike is excited to announce we have been named a “Strong Performer” in The Forrester Wave:™ Cloud Workload Security, Q1 2022. We believe this recognition, which marks the first time CrowdStrike is included in this cloud-focused report, underscores our rapid growth in the cloud security market and our commitment to building new innovations to secure cloud workloads.

Forrester researched, analyzed and scored the 12 most significant cloud workload security (CWS) vendors. CrowdStrike is among these companies that are characterized by “a thought-leading, productized portfolio of products and services,” the Forrester Wave states. They are frequently mentioned in Forrester end-user client inquiries, vendor selection RFPs, shortlists, consulting projects and case studies, and by other vendors during Forrester briefings as “viable and formidable competitors.” The Forrester Wave evaluated CWS providers on 33 criteria, which were grouped into the three high-level categories of:

• Current offering: setup, configuration, data integration, high availability/data sovereignty, identity and access management, cloud workload protection (CWP), cloud security posture management (CSPM), container protection, integration, reporting and scalability
• Strategy: execution roadmap, CWS integration, market approach, planned enhancements, supporting products and services, partner ecosystem and commercial model
• Market presence: CWS revenue and number of live installations

CrowdStrike received the highest possible score in the scalability criterion and also scored among the highest in the execution roadmap criterion, and among the second highest in the partner ecosystems criterion. As a strong player in the cloud security space, we believe this demonstrates our potential for continued growth and innovation in defending against cloud-focused threats.

 

The Forrester Wave evaluation of the CrowdStrike Falcon®^® platform details “great CSPM capabilities for Azure, including detecting overprivileged admins and enforcing storage least privilege and encryption, virtual machine, and network policy controls. The solution’s scalability is demonstrated by a large number of protected resources,” the Forrester report states.

 

“In its CWS strategy, CrowdStrike has been on the leading edge of CWS integration. CIEM plans are convincing, and the vendor has all the metrics in place to manage its reseller partner ecosystem,” Forrester writes in its report.

Planning and Building a Future in the Cloud

As adversaries have shifted to target enterprise cloud environments, CrowdStrike has emerged as a powerful player with cloud security innovation in both CWP and CSPM. The rise of cloud threats demands a stronger, more comprehensive approach to enterprise cloud defense.

 

Our adversary-focused approach is powered by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud, which correlates trillions of security events per day with indicators of attack (IOAs), our threat intelligence, and enterprise telemetry from across customer endpoints, workloads, identities, DevOps, IT assets and configurations. The Security Cloud turns this data into action, identifying the shifts in attacker tactics to better understand how an organization might be targeted and prevent threats. CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform provides visibility across all three major cloud providers with workload and runtime protection.

 

Cloud security should not be a “hodgepodge” of disparate tools, Forrester states. The CWS market has undergone considerable consolidation. While point solution providers are still relevant for technical innovation, Forrester sees end-user organizations increasingly prefer suite providers.

CrowdStrike believes the most effective cloud security is only possible through a combination of runtime security, provided through an agent-based approach, and control plane and build-time security provided through an agentless approach.

“CrowdStrike continues to invest heavily in developing our cloud security offerings, which are holistically integrated across agent-based and agentless approaches to provide end-to-end security from build-time to runtime,” said Amol Kulkarni, Chief Product and Engineering Officer at CrowdStrike. “This recognition from Forrester is a testament to the rapid strides we have made in this area and the significant customer adoption that has resulted.”

Our technology enables broad support for securing cloud environments: Falcon Cloud Security detects and prevents risk across AWS and Azure resources, and has assessment coverage for server, Kubernetes and serverless services to detect indicators of misconfiguration. Falcon Cloud Security also provides comprehensive breach protection for workloads, containers and Kubernetes, enabling organizations to build, run and secure cloud-native applications with speed and confidence. The solution secures cloud workloads and containers wherever they run and integrates directly into the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline for image and registry scanning. Teams can create verified image policies to ensure only approved images can progress through their pipeline and run in their hosts or Kubernetes clusters.

 

CrowdStrike is committed to building on its existing cloud security capabilities to provide customers with the protection they need to defend against modern threats — delivered through a unified, cloud-native platform. We are excited to be included in The Forrester Wave for Cloud Workload Security and look forward to building new technologies that defend against the future of cloud-focused threats.

Additional Resources

• Read about the capabilities built into Falcon Cloud Security by visiting its product page.
• Learn more about protecting cloud workloads using CrowdStrike and Amazon Web Services.
• Check out the Falcon Cloud Security product page to read the full details of its capabilities.