COVER STORY
More Partners, Bigger Strike Zone As CrowdStrike looks to bring its trailblazing security platform to SMBs—with the help of an army of MSP partners—CEO George Kurtz says the company has put ‘legacy’ technologies and top rivals such as Microsoft in its crosshairs.
By Kyle Alspach
E ven among the smallest of businesses, James Range has witnessed a dramatic shift in their willingness to spend on cybersecurity. Range pointed to the recent case of a small busi- ness that his company,White Rock Cybersecurity, has been working with. Despite having just 10 users, the tax software firm opted to deploy premium endpoint security technology from an enterprise-focused vendor: CrowdStrike. Why? Because the vendor’s track record suggested it would offer the best chance of holding the hackers at bay. And today, that’s priority No. 1 for a growing set of small and midsize busi- nesses, he said. “What they’re thinking is, ‘We have to be protected because if something happens, we’re out of business,’” said Range, the CEO of Dallas-based White Rock. It’s not just SMB attitudes that have changed, however. Solution providers such asWhite Rock now recognize that CrowdStrike— which is among the most prominent and widely used vendors in the enterprise security space—is also an increasingly good fit for SMB customers. Through the launch of Falcon Go—a more affordable version of its acclaimed Falcon security platform—CrowdStrike is hitting the right note with White Rock’s smaller customers, Range said. Falcon Go “has been a dynamite product. It helps get people [into CrowdStrike],” Range said. “It’s definitely geared for your SMB customer. It’s a little easier to use, but it’s still got most of the bells and whistles that [SMBs] need to protect their businesses and their livelihoods.” In addition, a major partnership with Pax8 is also playing
a key role as CrowdStrike is working aggressively to bring its technology down into the SMB market, an exceedingly rare move for a top-tier enterprise tech vendor. But according to CrowdStrike co-founder and CEO George Kurtz, the company is aiming big with small businesses, with the goal of transforming cybersecurity for SMBs in the same way it has for the enterprise. Plagued by data breaches and ransomware attacks, SMBs are simply not being protected by existing security tools from Microsoft and “legacy” antivirus vendors, Kurtz said in a recent interview with CRN . If those tools were doing the job, “there wouldn’t be companies like CrowdStrike, and you wouldn’t see all these breaches,” he said. CrowdStrike’s promise, Kurtz said, is to offer smaller businesses “something better”—the same core technology that has enabled substantial improvement in preventing ransomware in the enter- prise but simplified for SMB use. The early results from the SMB push have been positive, accord- ing to CrowdStrike executives. For SMBs that have struggled with cyberattacks, there’s huge interest in acquiring something that can truly “make the problem go away,” Kurtz said. “It’s very, very compelling.” The cybersecurity giant’s work with channel partners is the engine driving the SMB initiative, CrowdStrike executives said. In particular, CrowdStrike’s Pax8 partnership has been “game- changing,” Kurtz said. In the past, Pax8 has been instrumental in bringing an array of cloud-based technologies to MSPs and their SMB customers—a list that has notably included Microsoft’s cloud offerings.
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OCTOBER 2023
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