Roper Improves Visibility into Its Environments with CrowdStrike on AWS
Roper Technologies operates market-leading businesses that design and develop vertical software and technology-enabled products to serve customers in a variety of niche markets. Roper wanted to enhance and unify visibility into the digital environments across the portfolio of companies it has acquired over the years.
To take a more active approach against ransomware and modernize its cybersecurity efforts, Roper implemented CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security and CrowdStrike Falcon® Complete managed detection and response (MDR) across its subsidiaries. This allows teams to monitor environments around the clock in real time, gain comprehensive visibility into their infrastructures and centralize security through a single pane of glass. Roper is now better able to stop malicious activity before it affects its businesses, identify and mitigate vulnerabilities, and maximize the efficiency of its cybersecurity teams.
Diverse Technological Landscapes Obscure the View
Over the years, Roper has acquired many businesses. It now manages 27 of them, with subsidiaries around the world. Each business Roper acquired was in a different place technologically — each had unique infrastructures and workload management systems. With a long-time emphasis on security, Roper decided to standardize security practices and prioritize risk prevention, helping to support a proactive posture.
Across every type of organization, many IT teams today are not equipped to monitor all of their environments 24/7, making it even more challenging to fight ransomware, adopt more cloud-native services and securely implement containerized workloads — all key parts of Roper’s modernization strategy. To ensure it could monitor all environments, Roper decided to have all of its companies use the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform, centralizing cloud security for its Amazon Web Services (AWS) and on-premises environments.
A 30-Day Implementation of Enterprise-Level Threat Hunting
Roper partnered with CrowdStrike, an AWS Partner that provides a cloud-native platform for protecting critical areas of enterprise risk, including endpoints, cloud workloads, identity and data.
“We chose CrowdStrike not just for its best-in-class ability to protect us against threats but also to help us recover quickly in the unfortunate event that an incident may happen to us,” said Karine Thibault, Vice President of Cybersecurity at Roper Technologies.
Roper began with Falcon Complete and deployed the Falcon platform across all of its businesses in only 30 days. This enabled Roper to have robust visibility into its global infrastructure, including all AWS resources.
Unified Visibility Helps Spot Unknown Issues
By migrating to Falcon Complete, along with other modules such as Falcon Cloud Security, all businesses under Roper could see their digital environments through a single pane of glass. “We started getting real-time visibility across our businesses — inventory of assets, inventory of software, vulnerabilities and cyber threats,” Thibault said. “Until we deployed CrowdStrike, we had no single solution that allowed this level of reporting across all of our businesses.”
After deploying the Falcon platform across all of its business units, Roper had a deeper and actionable view of its security posture, which enabled it to immediately make targeted improvements.
“There are so many steps to gathering security telemetry every day, pulling from multiple consoles and running performance analysis on different platforms,” said Thibault.
With Falcon Cloud Security, Roper can more easily build and configure AWS services according to secure best practices. Roper’s security teams use the Falcon platform’s rich context to prioritize remediation efforts according to risk severity and respond more efficiently.
Real-Time Detection Drives Value
The Falcon sensor never requires a reboot, making it simple to deploy rapidly at scale. After deploying the Falcon sensor across all of its subsidiaries, Roper was able to detect, stop and mitigate issues in real time without having to devote additional resources, avoiding incidents that would have larger repercussions if not stopped in time.
“CrowdStrike caught events in time, helping our teams align internally for a swift and effective response,” Thibault said.
Now, teams across Roper’s businesses can react rapidly by leveraging CrowdStrike’s real-time indicators of attack, threat intelligence, evolving adversary tradecraft and enriched telemetry, producing highly accurate detections as well as automated protection and remediation.
Same Team, Better Productivity
In addition to speed, teams can work more efficiently because CrowdStrike prioritizes vulnerabilities and misconfigurations for them, helping Roper allocate resources more strategically. Instead of having security personnel dedicated to monitoring and testing, those employees can work on application security, DevSecOps and building more secure practices.
“With CrowdStrike, our businesses are able to better allocate their security teams,” Thibault said. “Rather than focusing on level-1 incident triage, we can reassign staff to tasks that are better suited for them and leverage each person’s expertise where it belongs.”
Delivering on Promises Leads to a Long-Term Partnership
Building on a successful implementation, Roper has since renewed its contract with CrowdStrike for three more years. CrowdStrike has become a dedicated partner to Roper, attending board meetings when needed and handling requests.
“Both the product and the customer service have been amazing, and I think that’s really part of what differentiates them,” Thibault said.