why invest in crowdstrike
Powering a secure future
The Opportunity
Cybersecurity is a 167 billion industry expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.9% until 2028. Covid-19 has shown that businesses were forced to shift to the cloud much sooner than expected. This has led to an explosion of cyberattacks as companies new to managing IT systems became easy fodder for attacks.
The attackers have become even more sophisticated. Now that more valuable intellectual property is online, cyberattacks are now being made by nations that seek to benefit since there is little chance of retaliation. For example, the level of sophistication required for the SolarWinds attack would not be worth it for an individual hacker, but it would be worth it for a nation state if the prize were large enough.
Whoever leads in a cloud cybersecurity solution is set to capitalize on this huge opportunity.
What it takes to win
Highly scalable systems need highly scalable solutions to protect those systems. No matter how good, a single human security team will not be able to defend against the myriad cyber threats in the world today.
Even if a great security team is familiar with thousands of common hacks and exploits, it only takes one weakness to cause millions of dollars in damages since the best hackers in the world will just look for the weakest link. In a simple example, hackers will do something called a ‘port scan’ to scan thousands of machines to see what machines are vulnerable and will query the weak computers it finds to find out what software it is running.
Once it finds out the version of software that is running, it is as simple as looking up the known vulnerabilities for that software version to exploit the system. For example, the Heartbleed bug was a devastating virus that allowed hackers to see everything that was typed over the internet. People were quick to publish patches that ‘fixed the Heartbleed bug’, but if you were a hacker, all you would need to do is scan for machines that were not on the latest patch.
Relying on an IT team to ‘always be on top of security patches’ is unreliable and also does not protect from new threats. Also, installing patches usually requires a reboot, so it needs to be scheduled in advance. In the meantime a virus can compromise the system before the reboot and cause massive damage.
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CrowdStrike, however, provides realtime updates so a virus is always up against the best cybersecurity protections instantly, no reboot required. This means the moment a vulnerability is known across the internet, the fix is already protecting every CrowdStrike enabled computer, so there is nothing left for hackers to exploit.
Compare this approach with spending millions to double the number of security professionals to patch ‘twice as fast’. It still will not secure the system since there are many more threats than that group can handle or know of. Crowdstrike’s scalable security solution, however, continues to evolve and grow stronger with every attack. Defending against millions of attacks across the world strengthens the AI and defends all companies in that cloud from the same attacks.
CrowdStrike implements a Cloud Native approach to cybersecurity with their distributed threat graph. Hackers tend to try many different methods to try to breach a network, but if the network is protected by a Cloud Native cybersecurity company, the entire network will get stronger with each attack, with no need for software updates, so no weak link across the entire cloud.
No one brings a knife to a gun fight. Cloud cybersecurity brings superior fire power to a growing threat.
The Moat
In the case of CrowdStrike’s AI powered threat graph, the more hackers try to hack CrowdStrike’s customers, the stronger the defenses become as the AI gets better and better at stopping breaches for all customers.
This leads to a better cybersecurity product that is able to protect against breaches better than other products, which would lead to more customers. More customers translate into more data, which means a better AI, and the cycle continues.
Whoever ends up becoming the dominant cloud cybersecurity provider in their particular space tends to extend their lead due to the way that AI improves dramatically with data.
