COVER STORY
CrowdStrike’s win rates versus Microsoft “continue to be very high,” CrowdStrike President Michael Sentonas told CRN . In a statement provided to CRN , Microsoft said that “cybersecu- rity is a top priority for Microsoft and has been for over 20 years.” “Anecdotal comments and marketing speak from competitors simply seeking market share does nothing towards keeping all customers safer,” Microsoft said in the statement. “We believe collaboration and partnership across the security industry is essen- tial to stay ahead of expansive advanced threats and find the aggressive competitive framing of security issues unfortunate.” ‘Not Mutually Exclusive’ As CrowdStrike’s move into the SMB market escalates its yearslong rivalry with Microsoft, solution providers are taking a variety of approaches when it comes to helping customers to select one—or both—of the vendors. Some solution provid-
need to be able to answer some really tough questions,” Drolet said. “CrowdStrike helps do that.” For SMBs, it’s abundantly clear that the market is underserved on security, CrowdStrike’s Bernard said. As just one indicator, tech-driven cyber insurer Coalition disclosed in a mid-2022 report that average claims for SMBs had surged 58 percent from the year before. “The modern attacks aren’t being stopped by whatever tech- nologies are deployed there,” Bernard said. “This is a market that so desperately needs modern, AI-powered cybersecurity.” To quickly improve the security posture of smaller businesses, CrowdStrike’s cloud-native architecture is a major advantage, Kurtz said. “It’s super easy to get an SMB up and running” on the platform, he said. And along with its affordability, the Falcon Go offering pro-
vides the core elements necessary to drastically improve threat visibility and prevention for SMBs, Kurtz said.
‘ e modern attacks aren’t being stopped by whatever technologies are being deployed there. is is a market that so desperately needs modern, AI- powered cybersecurity.’ — Daniel Bernard, Chief Business O cer, CrowdStrike
ers, such as White Rock, are finding that Crowd- Strike is actually less expensive than using Microsoft for endpoint security. In part, that’s on account of the “real expenses that the Micro- soft product has as far as
For the vendor and its partners, he said, SMB represents “such a mas- sive market that I think it will drive growth for many years to come.” To spearhead the SMB initiative, CrowdStrike hired Bernard, who was previously the CMO at SentinelOne, as chief business officer in January. Then came the Pax8 partnership. ‘Consumable For SMBs’ At Pax8, which serves nearly 30,000 partners, a growing chorus of solution providers had been asking the same thing in recent years: “‘When are you going to get CrowdStrike?’” said Nick Heddy, chief commerce officer at the Greenwood Village, Colo.- based distributor. To make CrowdStrike feasible for many MSPs and their SMB customers, however, there were obstacles that needed to be over- come. Requirements around the minimum number of licenses were a big one. So were the requirements for up-front payments and yearlong commitments. Pax8 and CrowdStrike, however, have worked together to address all of these issues, he said. Now partners will be able to acquire CrowdStrike licenses for a single user for just one month, allowing them to easily try the technology before expanding it across their customer base, Heddy said. The distributor is also handling some of the heavy lifting by taking on support and billing responsibilities for the CrowdStrike platform, he said. Pax8’s core mission is to “make things consumable for SMBs. And we absolutely did that with Microsoft,” Heddy said. “We
time, effort, putting all the different pieces together,”White Rock’s Range said. CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform, on the other hand, “takes less people to run. It’s easier to use,” he said. Another increasingly common scenario is that customers that already have Defender through a Microsoft 365 subscription will adopt CrowdStrike in addition to it, said Michelle Drolet, founder and CEO of Framingham, Mass.-based solution providerTowerwall. “A lot of organizations now are coming to us saying, ‘We have Defender, but we need defense-in-depth,’” she said, referencing the strategy of deploying numerous cyberdefense tools to make up for the limitations of any single product or technology. A frequent question from Microsoft customers is, “‘What else can we look at?’” Drolet said. “While Defender is still there with the E5 and E3 licenses, we’re adding layers with CrowdStrike—if not taking [Defender] out.” CrowdStrike frequently encounters this scenario across its customer base, according to Kurtz. “I really want to hammer this because I don’t think it’s as well-known that Microsoft and CrowdStrike are not mutually exclusive,” he said. All in all, demand for more effective cybersecurity tools is rising amid the intensifying threat landscape, growing insurance and regulatory requirements and myriad other security-related pressures. “The ransoms are getting larger. Cyber insurance policies are getting dropped. For our customers to sell to their customers, they
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OCTOBER 2023
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