5 Big CrowdStrike Moves For MSPs And MSSPs

The cybersecurity giant has been boosting its efforts with providers of managed services, including with the debut of its Falcon Complete for Service Providers program.

Doubling Down On MSPs, MSSPs

Cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike is making MSPs and MSSPs a central component of its growth strategy, including with the unveiling Tuesday of its Falcon Complete for Service Providers program. But the program is just one of several big moves that CrowdStrike has made recently around seeking to expand its engagement with providers of managed services.

CrowdStrike is looking to work with MSPs and MSSPs both around its flagship endpoint security offerings as well as the full set of modules available on its unified, cloud-native Falcon security platform, executives have told CRN. The company’s products within increasingly critical segments such as identity protection and cloud security are seeing rapid adoption by customers and partners, CrowdStrike disclosed during its latest quarterly call in August.

Working with MSPs and MSSPs is “a new market for CrowdStrike,” Chief Business Officer Daniel Bernard said in a recent interview. “MSPs have been clamoring to get their hands on our technology, and now we’re meeting them where they are.”

Ultimately, CrowdStrike is “taking the success we’ve had in the Fortune 500, the Global 2000, the lower end of enterprise, the smaller enterprises — and now bringing the power of the technology to the MSPs,” Bernard said.

What follows are five of CrowdStrike’s big moves for MSPs and MSSPs.

Falcon Go

CrowdStrike is aiming to reach more MSPs in part through its Falcon Go platform, an affordably priced version of its Falcon unified security platform that’s landed more than 1,000 net new customers for the company, CrowdStrike Co-Founder and CEO George Kurtz said in March. “We believe this early success reaching the ‘S’ in the SMB demonstrates the immense demand for CrowdStrike’s best-in-class endpoint protection, even among the smallest and [most] cost-conscious organizations,” Kurtz said at the time.

Hiring Daniel Bernard

To help accelerate the vendor’s expansion with MSPs and MSSPs, CrowdStrike hired Daniel Bernard in the newly created role of chief business officer in January. Bernard — who CrowdStrike poached from rival security vendor SentinelOne — has taken on overseeing both the CrowdStrike channel program and the company’s growth initiative with smaller partners and customers overall overall, Kurtz said in March.

Managed XDR Launch

In April, CrowdStrike unveiled Falcon Complete XDR, a new managed XDR (extended detection and response) offering that aims to make the technology applicable to more partners, including MSPs, than it has been to date.

XDR can “become the control plane that they use to manage cybersecurity end-to-end,”Bernard told CRN. “That’s revolutionary in the market. But also, folks need help doing it.”

As a managed XDR (MXDR) offering, Falcon Complete XDR follows the model of CrowdStrike’s popular managed detection and response (MDR) service. CrowdStrike’s MDR offering has provided 24/7 management of the vendor’s EDR technology to customers that lack the resources to do so themselves (which is not at all a rarity, amid the massive talent shortage in cybersecurity). In the same way, the CrowdStrike MXDR aims to offer management of the vendor’s XDR platform to make the technology relevant to more MSPs, Bernard said.

Pax8 Partnership

In June, CrowdStrike partnered with cloud distributor Pax8 to further its footprint in the MSP market and help enhance protection and mitigation when it comes cyber risks. “Enterprise security players with some of the best technology in the world, like CrowdStrike, have been requested by our partners for some time,” Nick Heddy, chief commerce officer for Denver-based Pax8, told CRN.

Ultimately, “the MSP market is really the next foray of where we want to take growth,” Bernard said. “What Pax8 has done in terms of creating this disruptive cloud marketplace makes it easy to buy, easy to scale and easy to bill. It’s the whole life-cycle management of how an MSP consumes technology. We chose Pax8 not only because of their scale and reach from a global perspective, but also the experience that partners have.”

Falcon Complete For Service Providers

On Tuesday, CrowdStrike announced the launch of Falcon Complete for Service Providers, a program aimed at providing MSPs, MSSPs and other partners the “ability to create and augment their service offerings with CrowdStrike’s elite 24/7 expert monitoring, proactive threat hunting, integrated threat intelligence, and end-to-end remediation offerings,” the company said in a news release. The program is designed to enable partners such as MSPs/MSSPs to “rapidly scale” their managed security service offerings, while also closing skill gaps and augmenting their teams, by tapping into CrowdStrike’s MDR capabilities, according to CrowdStrike.

Ultimately, Falcon Complete for Service Providers aims to help MSPs, MSSPs and other partners to “create and deliver new managed security services leveraging CrowdStrike’s industry-leading MDR and MXDR offerings,” the company said.