COVER STORY
CrowdStrike co-founder and CEO George Kurtz discusses how the company is doubling down on partners, competing with Microsoft on security and expanding more broadly within the IT space.
When it comes to preventing breaches, what are the biggest reasons you’d argue CrowdStrike is superior to Microsoft’s technology? I ask every customer this—it’s a very simple question: ‘When is the last time Microsoft has called you and said you had a potential breach condition?’ I haven’t got one answer— not one. We’ve got an overlay where we’re engaging with customers. And we’re focusing on getting an outcome. The outcome is stopping the breach. If we see something and the company doesn’t take action, we’re on the phone, we’re emailing, we’re engaging with them.Time is a critical element in stopping breaches—seconds matter.And that’s what we do end to end. That’s highly differentiated from Microsoft, or pick any of the other competitors that are out there in our space, because they haven’t built this integrated approach. And candidly, they don’t really have the architecture that gives them the real-time visibility we have. At your investor day in the spring, you shared a stat that with 75 percent of breaches of Microsoft customers that you’ve investigated, Defender had been in use but was bypassed. Does that continue to be the case? Absolutely. When we go in and we investigate these attacks—yes, there’s probably some Microsoft technology that got exploited. But a lot of times, it’s Defender that’s actually being used to protect against these attacks. It really is the fox guarding the henhouse. If you look at the latest breaches that you’ve seen in the government space, and you look at some of the certificates that were stolen, and the [attackers’] ability to impersonate other users across the [Microsoft] 365 environment, it’s scary. And that’s a function of some of the architectural challenges that existed pre-2000, in the way Microsoft works and the way [Active] Directory works. Those challenges were just moved and replicated, en masse, into their cloud. So it’s a challenge for many customers.And there’s a reason why we’ve done so well—because we’re not building applications. We’re
not building cloud architectures. We’re building security technologies that work across a heterogeneous environ- ment and across all cloud environments. And that’s what customers are looking for. Are you expecting to see more partners switching from Microsoft security technologies to CrowdStrike? I absolutely think so. Because more and more, we’re seeing the crisis in confidence from Microsoft customers—where they’ve had a problem, they had a breach, they read the news.When the U.S. government is being breached because of Microsoft’s own architectural flaws, that’s pretty concern- ing.And I think you have partners looking at that and going, ‘OK, what else is out there? Maybe there are other things that we need to add to the mix to make sure that these cus- tomers stay safe.’ [It’s] death by a thousand cuts. It’s the technology which is insecure, which is your zero-day Tuesdays. It’s things like the U.S. government being breached because of Microsoft’s failures.There’s only so many opportunities to say, ‘Hey, you get it for free, use it’ when people are saying, ‘Well, you’re putting us at risk.’ And that’s really what we’re hearing from customers—Microsoft is putting them at risk. In terms of expanding into the SMB market, do you see the potential to do the same thing there that you did for enterprises? That’s absolutely right. [Cybersecurity] is one of the unique spaces where you can protect the DoD [Department of Defense] and you can protect the smallest little SMB—it basically is the same technology. So what we found is that being born in the cloud, it’s super easy to get an SMB up and running. We remove a lot of the complexity for them. Time-to-value is immediate. And we’re seeing that in the SMB space, there’s still a very fragmented market of legacy [antivirus] players that are there, and that’s pretty much all they have for protec-
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OCTOBER 2023
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