Cloudflare and CrowdStrike are two of the leading Zero Trust networking solutions providers. Today, these two companies have announced a strategic partnership to provide customers with a single security platform to protect their networks and endpoint assets.
This solution utilises Cloudflare’s Zero Trust Network Access service to enable segmentation of network traffic and the CrowdStrike Falcon Endpoint Protection Platform to provide deep visibility into endpoint assets. By combining these services, organisations can significantly reduce their attack surface and reduce security risks.
The joint offering protects against advanced threats such as ransomware, targeted attacks, and zero-day vulnerabilities. It also supports compliance requirements such as SIEM, pentesting and SOC2 auditing. With this joint solution, organisations can easily implement a comprehensive security strategy that simultaneously covers their networks and endpoints.
Furthermore, by leveraging Cloudflare’s global infrastructure and CrowdStrike’s managed service capabilities, customers can gain access to the latest security solutions to stay compliant with industry data protection and privacy standards.
What is Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is a provider of cloud-based business security, performance and reliability services. The company focuses on providing digital performance and security solutions to customers worldwide. Solutions include web application firewall, DDoS protection, content delivery networks (CDNs) for streaming media, distributed DNS (Domain Name System) resolution, SSL/TLS encryption of communication over the Internet, access control lists to block suspicious activities from malicious sources and more.
Cloudflare also offers APIs for customers to integrate its services into their applications and websites and an enterprise platform that enables customers to build custom solutions tailored to their particular needs.
The company’s mission is simple: help build a better Internet by protecting web sites from data breaches, hacking attempts and helping make websites faster with features such as content delivery networks (CDNs). Cloudflare helps companies ensure their websites remain secure while delivering superior website performance and high availability without the need for extensive IT management or additional hardware.
What is CrowdStrike?
CrowdStrike is a leading endpoint security platform with an innovative approach to preventing, detecting and responding to cyber threats. The company’s Falcon Platform, designed for the cloud-native enterprise, provides comprehensive protection at the endpoint and across the attack surface. It also offers superior visibility for making better security decisions faster through its analytics-driven threat intelligence and advanced behavior monitoring technology.
Founded in 2011 by talent from leading security companies including Google, Symantec, McAfee and other global leaders, CrowdStrike has revolutionized how organizations protect their data and devices from breaches. It is the first security vendor to provide cloud-delivered “next gen” endpoint protection brokers leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). In addition, its crowd sourced intelligence network helps organizations address evolving adversaries faster than ever before possible.
CrowdStrike’s platform provides complete virus prevention with memory protection, process control automation for systems running Windows or MacOS operating systems. This helps protect users from sophisticated malware attacks that are difficult to detect until damage has been done. In addition, CrowdStrike’s endpoint detection capabilities let organizations quickly hunt for malicious activity on their networks by leveraging cognitive AI model development that automatically detects unknown bad actor techniques associated with advanced persistent threats (APTs) or data exfiltration attempts as soon as they enter a network. The company also delivers insight into file behaviors so companies can effectively prioritize their limited IT resources and determine which threats need immediate attention versus those that can be addressed later in real-time environments when resources are available.
Benefits of Combining Cloudflare and CrowdStrike
Combining the benefits of Cloudflare and CrowdStrike can provide robust endpoint security and Zero Trust capabilities. By combining these two solutions, organizations can take advantage of advanced security features while benefiting Zero Trust technology. This can help organizations protect their digital assets from malicious attacks and enhance their security posture.
Let’s explore how organizations can benefit from combining Cloudflare and CrowdStrike.
Zero Trust Security
The combined offering from Cloudflare and CrowdStrike provides an innovative way to secure devices with zero trust security. This new collaboration helps organizations deploy and maintain an extra layer of zero trust security for their devices.
Zero trust security (ZTS) is a network architecture model that eliminates users needing to be authenticated and authorized each time they access a particular device or resource. Instead of relying on default settings, users must be identified and authenticated before allowing access to the system. This model helps organizations better protect sensitive data within their networks by providing strong authentication methods that can’t easily be hacked or bypassed by unauthorized personnel.
In addition to enhancing security, ZTS also streamlines network performance by eliminating excess traffic on local machines, virtual networks, and cloud resources. By eliminating unnecessary authentication requests, administrators are able to lower their overall cost savings while protecting their critical systems more effectively.
By using Cloudflare’s enterprise-grade infrastructure and CrowdStrike’s unified endpoint security platform, organizations can benefit from increased visibility into the sensitive data they need to protect while having greater control over how it’s accessed and secured across various devices. As such, this integrated solution will help resolve common endpoint challenges such as properly scoping user account privileges to prevent malicious attacks from compromising critical infrastructure and gaining control over software vulnerabilities to avoid threats faster than ever.
Centralized Management
Combining Cloudflare and CrowdStrike provides organizations with unprecedented security capabilities, unifying the secure delivery of online services with a preemptive breach protection system. Additionally, centralized management allows organizations to manage network security functions and user authentication processes from one source. As a result, determining who is accessing corporate assets, what is being accessed and how it is accessed has never been easier or more secure!
Cloudflare’s Zero Trust service complements CrowdStrike’s endpoint protection platform by requiring users to authenticate their identity before accessing corporate assets over the internet. This ensures that only authorized users have access to critical data while reducing the risk of malicious actors infiltrating the corporate network. Additionally, administrators can receive real-time updates and analytics to detect emerging threats within the network quickly and efficiently.
By enabling two-factor authentication, Cloudflare also helps organization securely authenticate all their users without sacrificing convenience. As a result of integrating these services, organizations can reduce concern for unauthorized or malicious access attacks on their digital assets due to a failure in identity management or insufficient endpoint defense methods. This allows them to enjoy infinite scalability backed by cutting-edge security protocols that provide protection against online threats.
Improved Visibility and Control
Combining Cloudflare and CrowdStrike gives organizations improved visibility and control over their web traffic and endpoint security. With this combined solution, organizations can benefit from the power of Zero Trust security, ensuring that access is only granted to authenticated users and authorized to access the information they need.
By using Cloudflare’s distributed threat intelligence across its infrastructure and leveraging CrowdStrike’s endpoint monitoring capabilities, organizations can gain greater clarity over how data flows within their network, allowing them to quickly identify potential threats in their environment.
Cloudflare’s distributed cloud platform allows for granularly-defined rules that define what type of traffic is accepted by the organization’s web application or APIs, minimizing malicious traffic while simultaneously enhancing user experience — improving both performance and security. While CrowdStrike Falcon gives customers an additional layer of protection with its advanced endpoint protection capabilities. This layer provides real-time prevention against known and unknown threats and valuable insight into malicious activities occurring in the network.
By combining these two solutions, customers can have a full-stack view of all activities occurring within their systems, providing them with better security posture and reducing alert fatigue since they don’t have to monitor multiple disparate solutions. In addition, the combination of Cloudflare’s advanced WAF capabilities and CrowdStrike’s industry-leading EDR offers customers improved visibility into their environments as well as greater control over who has access to what data — creating a strong zero trust security posture for companies looking for extra assurance when it comes to protecting themselves from potential threats.
Challenges of Combining Cloudflare and CrowdStrike
The combination of Cloudflare and CrowdStrike can present various challenges organizations must address to secure their environment. These challenges include the complexity of implementing the two solutions together and ensuring they are properly integrated; developing a comprehensive visibility and control strategy that enables endpoint data sharing on an ongoing basis; understanding the differences between Cloudflare and CrowdStrike’s capabilities, management responsibilities, and product lifecycles; configuring the two solutions to eliminate malicious traffic while allowing legitimate user requests; and maintaining an adequate security posture over time as organizations mature their strategies.
Organizations must also consider whether existing tools are adequate or more advanced analytics are necessary to meet security requirements.
There is a potential risk of misconfiguration from combining multiple platforms, making testing critical before deployment in production environments. Organizations must remain vigilant when monitoring their environment’s integrity, identify any changes or anomalies that may occur in real-time, analyze data for errors or malicious activity, quickly detect anomalies so action can be taken before damage is done, evaluate system access & privileges frequently for changes or misuse, and ensure that departmental/enterprise security policies reflect compliance regulations with each external provider.
