The Schunk Group is an international technology company with 60 companies and over 9,000 employees in 29 countries. Schunk is a leading supplier of products made of high-tech materials, such as carbon, technical ceramics and sintered metal, as well as machines and systems that range from environmental simulation to air conditioning technology and ultrasonic welding to optical machines.

Because of Schunk’s globe-spanning diversity, its IT department contends with a broad number of security challenges, according to Christian Maxeiner, Head of IT Technology at Schunk. “For example, the separation of IT and operational technology (OT) is becoming more and more blurred, which means that industrial plants with access to the internet must be taken into account as a potential attack vector,” he said. “The secure decoupling of legacy systems that can no longer be patched is also part of our range of tasks. And of course, fighting industrial espionage and protecting our intellectual property are also important roles for us.” He also noted the challenge of effectively countering a threat landscape that can vary country by country given Schunk’s global footprint.

Faced with such modern and ever-increasing security challenges, and having realized that its legacy, signature-based cybersecurity product was no longer able to provide the necessary level of protection, Schunk chose a next-generation security solution built on the advanced, cloud-native CrowdStrike Falcon® platform.

The CrowdStrike solution quickly showed its value. Thanks to the greatly increased visibility into Schunk’s system infrastructure, Maxeiner’s team was able to detect things in the network that had remained hidden from the previous product. While these discoveries caused extra work for the team, the potential attack surface was significantly reduced thanks to the vulnerabilities that were fixed.

Schunk Relies on Cloud-Native CrowdStrike Security to Protect Its Networks

The rollout of the Falcon platform was extremely straightforward, with CrowdStrike’s next-generation technology and the legacy product running in parallel until the latter was fully uninstalled. At no time during either process did Maxeiner’s team experience errors or other technical complications. Because of the Falcon platform’s cloud-native foundation, Schunk was able to easily upgrade the security of 9,400 endpoints within two months.

CrowdStrike Complements Security Technology with Managed Threat Hunting Service

To be truly effective in protecting against known and unknown threats, Schunk knew it could not rely on technology alone. The company therefore enlisted CrowdStrike’s Falcon OverWatch™ managed threat hunting team, whose expertise is available to Schunk around the clock and ensures that the company is well-equipped against potential attacks of all kinds.

In addition to Falcon OverWatch threat hunting, Schunk relies on numerous CrowdStrike security modules including CrowdStrike Falcon^® Intelligence, CrowdStrike Falcon^® Insight endpoint detection and response (EDR), CrowdStrike Falcon^® Device Control, CrowdStrike Falcon^® Spotlight vulnerability management and CrowdStrike Falcon^® Discover IT hygiene.

“Now, thanks to the well-coordinated modules, we finally have the centralized overall view that I always wanted for our company,” said Maxeiner. “Of course, this also makes us feel more secure. My boss, our CIO, also sees it that way.”