Why the CrowdStrike Partnership With Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport is Passionately Driven

February 13, 2019

| Johanna Flower | Executive Viewpoint

Last week, we announced our partnership with Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport to protect the Formula1® team. In a world where high-profile brands and global sporting events are in the sights of cyberattackers, I want to add some color to the motivations that drive our partnership and examine the synergies between our respective organizations. This partnership goes way beyond simply putting a logo on the side of a car. The high-pressure world of Formula1® is the perfect platform to demonstrate our technology and showcase our ability to protect our customers from modern threat actors in some of the most challenging of circumstances. Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport

may be likened to a “data center on wheels going at 200 mph down a wet track.” It’s a world of constant technical innovation coupled with a fierce drive for excellence and advantage over your rivals. The parallels with cybersecurity could not be more obvious. The sophistication of the cars is matched by that of the team’s technical environment. It’s a complex infrastructure that must support the team throughout the 21-race season across the major continents of the world. In some organizations, a geographically dispersed workforce and facilities might provide a fertile attack surface. Instead, the CrowdStrike^® Falcon^® platform solves these challenges with a simple cloud-native solution. Our approach makes it easy to deploy to geographically diverse teams and once deployed, our single lightweight agent provides critical threat protection without slowing any systems down. Both CrowdStrike and the Mercedes team rely on split-second decision-making. Drivers have milliseconds to read the track conditions and respond. Likewise, CrowdStrike Falcon® must read the activity unfolding on a computer and take action in milliseconds to stop malicious activity. For both CrowdStrike and Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, the ability to “make the right call under pressure” is critical to success. Winning Formula1® races is also about extraordinary engineering innovation: from the early creation of steel disk brakes and the development of downforce to the use of composite materials to manage weight. Innovation drives competitive advantage and the parallels with a cybersecurity adversary arms race are clear. Just like the Mercedes team, if CrowdStrike doesn’t out-innovate at breathtaking speed, we may be defeated. This is what drives us both.

Figure 1: Race Support Room where data meets human capital

When I visited the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport facility in Brackley, I was fortunate to be shown the Race Support Room. The similarity with any sophisticated ISOC was clear from the moment I entered the room. Of course, you need exceptional drivers to win races, but much like our own hidden Falcon Overwatch™ threat hunting team, you also need people who have the extraordinary ability to interpret and act upon what the information is revealing. Also, they have to do so at a pace that is every bit as quick as the action on the track. I am delighted to see the reveal of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1W10 EQ Power+, especially as it sports our logo for the first time. Rest assured we will be with the team for every mile throughout the season with an equal passion to protect and win against all opposition. Additional Resources