CrowdStrike Falcon Reviews

The initial use case was for CrowdStrike to be a replacement for McAfee. We wanted to come up with something that was a lot more adaptive to emerging world threats and not just strictly signature-based. We wanted something focused a lot more on heuristic analysis and pattern analysis first, e.g., isn't just sheer signature. Additional use cases are workstation servers and as much as we can do in our OT environment.

It has allowed our security team to have more time and resources built into things that are used to run the business versus needing to babysit our antivirus platform, or any malware platform. With what we have been paying for, it allows us to be a lot more involved with how the business is being run from a security, risk, and compliance standpoint.

We have signed up for Falcon Complete, which is their completely managed service. This has done nothing but paid dividends since we have rolled it out. Slightly before I started, there was a ransomware issue. CrowdStrike did exactly what it was supposed to when we joined networks with the company that we were acquiring. So, that was helpful to us.

To the best of our knowledge, it has stopped everything that we have seen. It has allowed us to focus our efforts on other things relevant to how the overall business functions.

It helps us in the M&A environment because it is a very simple, easy tool to deploy, being pretty much all cloud-based. While we're not building our security practice around it, it is a tool that we want to make sure does integrate well, if at all possible, with any new tool that we purchase moving forward.

It is especially important to us that CrowdStrike Falcon is a cloud-native solution. We have a directive for cloud-first architecture at this point. Anything that is cloud-native, or has a cloud offering, will always get first billing over something that is on-prem. We are a small security team. Having the ability to have a service or application that is not wholly managed by us, but rather governed and used by us, is the ideal solution.

The flexibility comes from allowing us to do a mass push, if we need to. We would find always-on protection with pretty much any solution. However, the fact that it is in the cloud, that just makes it that much better.

I would like to see a little bit more in the offline scanning ability. This just comes from my background in what I have done in other positions. They only scan on demand, so I always have this fear that we sometimes maybe email out a dormant virus and can be held liable for that. That is something where I would like to see a little bit more robustness to the tool. 

U.S. Venture has been using it since the first quarter of 2019. I, however, did not start with the organization until the Summer of 2020.

It has been very stable. There have been no real issues that we have had in the deployment or use of the CrowdStrike system in general. There has been zero downtime.

For our workstations, we don't worry about the updates. However, we have a tighter grip on updates for our server environment only because there was an issue at a point with one update. Since then, we would like to keep our deployments at an N-1. So, there is more of a check built-in just to make sure that the latest and greatest doesn't actually break anything unintentionally.

The CrowdStrike sensor is always kept at N-1 for our production servers. Our test servers are always up to date.

From what we have seen, it is very scalable. We have recently acquired a company where someone had a ransomware attack when we joined networks. Within the course of just a few days, we were able to easily get CrowdStrike rolled out to about 300 machines. That also included the removal of that company's legacy anti-malware tool.

We have all our desktop engineering group and server team as admins in the system, but they only use it for specific troubleshooting in their job roles. So, if the server team needs to do something, then they can just log in and do it as well as the desktop engineering group. They can just go in and do stuff, if it is something related to computers or servers. As far as for the overall management of the system, that is left to the security team.

It is currently being used to the extent that we need it. After CrowdStrike had their user conference last Fall, they introduced a lot of new tools, specifically one around forensic that we would like to get our hands on. However, there are no real plans for doing any major increases of its toolset. I do know that there is a project that will be going on for using its mobile application on some Android tablets, but it is still very much in its infancy. So, we are not quite sure how that will roll out yet.

I have never used their standard technical support. I do everything through their unofficial Reddit support forum. Also, if there are any other major technical issues, then I work directly with our TAM. So, I have never just reached out and created a general support case. Therefore, I cannot speak to how well they respond. However, their unofficial Reddit support has been fantastic with helping me work through troubleshooting issues and a couple of queries, where I was having issues trying to get the syntax correct. They have been nothing but helpful.

I believe they have their actual support engineers on Reddit, but there is no SLA nor anything guaranteed on that Reddit page. They claim that right there in the subreddit rule. However, I have had nothing but good luck working through them. It could take a few hours to one or two days to get a response, but it has always been for things that aren't pressing. For things that are pressing, then it is a direct call or email to our technical account manager who is very responsive.

They have a great online forum for customer use cases. That has been a great crowd sourcing thing. It is unofficial. I just stumbled across it, but the subreddit for their support has been spectacular for many reasons.

Previous to CrowdStrike, our organization was using McAfee VSE with McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO). Switching from McAfee to CrowdStrike, we saw a reduction in resources being used on both the workstations and servers. We saw an increase in detections, be that good or bad. We would like to think it was a good thing, because now it is finding a lot more stuff that wasn't strictly signature-based. So, it provided almost a very lightweight SIEM-type of response. It was providing information about installed applications, account lockouts, and top console users. It was a very nice bonus to have that information in addition to just the general overall anti-malware that CrowdStrike is known for.

CrowdStrike is so much easier to use. The UI is far more intuitive. The breakout of how the policies as well as the organizational structure within the UI for how the computers are laid out is far more intuitive. It feels a lot more based around how AD kind of functions. Because I am already familiar with Active Directory, the move to using that in CrowdStrike is very seamless, at least in my mind.

The agent is far more lightweight than our previous antivirus solution. It is a lot less resource intensive. We don't have any more on-prem servers to manage for running the application, which is another benefit to being in the cloud. There are just a couple of holes punched in the firewall for communication in and out.

A lot of the switch was focused around the fact that CrowdStrike was solely a cloud-native solution as well as heuristics versus signature.

It is very simple to deploy the solution’s sensor to our endpoints. Right now, it is part of our standard build process through a SCCM. So, it gets a version, then it is obviously outdated because our desktop engineering group can only update the image so quickly. Once it is checked into the cloud, it updates, decides to download, and gets the new seamless version. It has been wonderful to have and very helpful to us.

The initial setup was done in less than two months.

The implementation strategy was done how any other mass deployment is done. You take a small set of computers, put it on one, remove the old solution, and then run that group by itself, figuring out if there are any new or existing exemptions that needed to be in play. Once it is stable, it is rolled out to a larger group, the process is repeated, and then it is moved onto the servers.

Overall, four people worked on the deployment: It would have been my predecessor, my other coworker, and two server guys to do the server environments.

Our ROI has been high compared to what we had with McAfee. We spend about two hours a month for its care and feeding, which is really low maintenance. We previously spent two to three times that amount of time managing our McAfee environment.

Pricing and licensing seem to be in line with what they offer. We are a smaller organization, so pricing is important. Obviously, we would make a business case if it is something we really needed or felt that we needed. So, the pricing is in line with what we are getting from a product standpoint.

Since moving to CrowdStrike, we have not looked at other endpoint management solutions. In fact, when we look at a new tool, we want to make sure it will play well with CrowdStrike, be it a new SIEM or anything cloud-based. 

Make sure you know what the policies do. There are a lot of good and bad things that you can do with too strict or too loose of a policy governing workstations or servers.

We have evaluated the CrowdStrike Horizon module. We are not there yet. Our environment has not changed drastically since our last review of it. So, we have not felt the need to revisit it since then.

It is important to not solely rely on one product, especially one that has a good or bad name, such as McAfee. Because there was a lot of, "Oh no, we got an antivirus. We're fine." It helps to make sure you always have an in-depth defense strategy.

I would rate it a solid nine out of 10. 

We use it for our endpoint detection and response on our devices for both endpoints and servers. It has replaced our traditional antivirus. We are strictly using it now to do all our antivirus duties.

We are primarily a Windows environment, 95 percent Windows. Then, we have a little bit of Linux and Macs in there as well.

They have been able to help us. We have used other functions, such as Discover, to identify software that is running in our environment. This is not necessarily bad software, but it gives us an idea of what is out there to start building a standard configuration, which helps us build policies for what we do want in our environment and what we don't. That has been very valuable as well. It is kind of an offset of what they actually do; their main bread and butter, if you will. They have been very helpful with other tasks, such as that and in finding themes. 

We are pretty confident in CrowdStrike. Knock on wood, we haven't had any breaches that we know about. When you do see a large breach in the news, it seems like CrowdStrike is always mentioned. They are either helping investigate or leading the incident response (IR) process for them. While I can't really say it has specifically stopped a data breach for us, we are confident that if something happened then CrowdStrike would catch it.

We primarily use the Falcon feature. It is very dependable for us. We have done multiple tests against it and thrown everything we could at it. It does seem to pick up quite a bit, if not everything, that we have tested with it. So, we rely heavily on it. Right out-of-the-box, the main Falcon component is the biggest feature that we utilize and rely on.

We are a heavy laptop environment. So, it was nice to know that our users would be protected and we would know what was going on, on the endpoint, regardless of how they were connected. That has been very valuable. This is one of the reasons why we chose to go with this solution.

The fact that this is a cloud-native solution means that we don’t need to worry about updates. They take care of all the back-end and architecture. The only updates that we need to worry about are the sensors themselves. If you set them to auto update, like we do, then you don't even have to worry about that. It definitely frees us up to do more important things. If it wasn't for them doing this, we would need at least a part-time FTE, if not a full-time, to operate and manage CrowdStrike keeping it up-to-date as well as the hygiene. We had half of an FTE assigned to our antivirus prior to CrowdStrike. Now, that is just included in our dailies. It lessens that burden so much that we don't even need a slotted requirement for that. Overall, this solution saves us at least a good 10 hours a week that we would have been using before.

Their threat dashboards are very helpful. For instance, with this zero-day that just came out from Microsoft, they already have a dashboard where you can see the assets in your environment affected or at risk. That is just an added value. 

It would be nice if they did have some sort of Active Directory tie-in, whether that be Azure or on-prem. Sometimes, it is difficult for us to determine if we are missing any endpoints or servers in CrowdStrike. We honestly don't have a great inventory, but it would be nice if CrowdStrike had a way to say this is everything in your environment, Active Directory-wise, and this is what doesn't have sensors. They try to do that now with a function that they have built-in, but I have been unsuccessful in having it help us identify what needs a sensor. So, better visibility of what doesn't have a sensor in our environment would be helpful.

We have been using it for four years.

Stability has been really good. We have not seen the issues that we had with traditional AV. Having it connected to the cloud has really helped with stability, being able to see what a computer is doing at all times, and being able to see the last check-in times, this has kind of helped with the sensors.

It is primarily just me for tweaking or management of the solution. I have backups, if needed, but it is such a light lift that I may spend an hour or two a week in the console. It really is a great product that takes care of itself. Not a lot of tweaking has been needed so far, knock on wood. We haven't really had to make any exclusions like we used to with traditional AV. Everything is running with CrowdStrike's full protection, which is a huge bonus for us, since traditionally you are pretty blind. 

The solution is very scalable and easy to deploy as well as sync up agents with it.

The end users are the security team, which consists of about four of us. Then, we have a couple of leads from other technical teams. So, there are probably eight users who have access to CrowdStrike. Primarily, there are just three of us who are in there constantly.

The technical support has been pretty good. They are usually very responsive. We haven't had to escalate anything. When we have needed a more technical, deep dive, we have been able to get a dedicated engineer for our account to assist us. So, there has never been a time where we feel like we can't get the help that we need.

We were previously using McAfee.

CrowdStrike seems to detect quite a bit more than McAfee did. We like how it is kind of real-time, if you will. It is not so much signature-based. So, it has been able to stop things quicker than McAfee did. We have seen a huge increase in performance on our systems. Oftentimes, the daily scans would need to be run with signature-based AV or scans with servers, then that would cause great performance hits. It kind of limited us as well to where we could only scan certain windows. Now that we have CrowdStrike, we are kind of always-on and not limited to having to do those scans. So, that has been a big performance increase for us.

It is a lot easier to use CrowdStrike than McAfee, especially having the team at CrowdStrike handle the maintenance day-to-day, etc. With on-prem, you are responsible for everything. Whereas, with CrowdStrike, we can just worry about our IR response, basic deployment, and health checks. So, it is very convenient having them handle it in the cloud.

CrowdStrike was cutting edge technology at the time. EDR was still kind of new then versus the traditional AV. Not only because of licensing costs, but also because of performance, we felt that we needed something new.

It is easy to deploy the solution’s sensor to our endpoints. We have that as part of our build process. When new things are built, we have those as part of the build. If for some reason, something gets corrupted, then it is fairly simple to redeploy and we utilize SCCM for that. However, it is pretty run of the mill, i.e., easy. With the updates being taken care of by CrowdStrike, once it is deployed, then you are pretty much good to go.

Our initial deployment took about a week. That was only due to working out how to adjust CrowdStrike in our environment: weed out false positives, mimic anything that we needed to from our traditional AV over to CrowdStrike, and test previous exclusions that we had for our traditional AV, if we needed those anymore in CyberArk. It was very easy to deploy with SCCM, then it was more just tweaking. 

We did a test in our test environment and saw no negative impacts. Although not advised by CrowdStrike, we were able to run our traditional AV while we were deploying CrowdStrike. Once we knew CrowdStrike was on the machine working, then we were able to send out scripts to remove the old, traditional AV. Our strategy: We knew that it would not, at least in our environment, hurt us to have both on temporarily. So, our deployment strategy was very simple, knowing that we had an AV in place to back us up if something didn't go right with the CrowdStrike install.

I did the deployment. If there were exclusions or something that we needed to address, then I worked with the individual teams.

The 10 hours a week that we are freeing up from having to manage and monitor our AV solution has really allowed us to focus on other areas of the business. This has been a huge return on investment.

We did the free trial to kick the tires. Part of that head trial was having us load stuff and trying to get by it, and we weren't. That trial really helped sell us that it was a good product.

Getting the free trial was very easy. It has been years now, but it was as simple as just going to the website and requesting a free trial, then it was stood up maybe even that same day. It is hard to remember now, but it was very quick.

The pricing and licensing are fairly good. It is definitely not a cheap product, but I have felt that it is worth the money that we spent. So, we have discussed it in the past, and were like, "Yes, it is probably pricier than some other solutions, but we also feel they really are the leader. We are very comfortable with their level of expertise. So, it's kind of worth the price that we pay."

We do add their OverWatch protection, which is an extra bit of an add-on, but that gives us 24/7 SOC-type watching. So, we have added that on, which has been valuable as well. Outside of that, there have been no more additional costs.

We were looking for an EDR solution. At the time, CrowdStrike was the leader. We were very big into Gartner reviews, and we went off of Gartner. We just wanted the best that was out there.

Do it. It is a great product. I seriously think it is worth considering. We have been completely happy with the solution that we have been running on for years now and have never regretted our decision. I highly recommend it.

We plan on possibly looking into the added features that they offer to see if there is something there that can increase our incident response or add value to our business.

It is our primary EDR, so we are using it 100 percent for that and plan on using it for other avenues. We found Discover can help us with the inventory for applications. So, I am looking for other business opportunities there to help us, which will be our goal in the future.

It has given us some insight into how threat actors work. The biggest thing for us has been threat actor education. They give you intel which helps you identify what attackers you would more likely be targeted by. A lot of this comes with our OverWatch protection. Their threat intel has probably been the biggest thing for us.

Overall, I hate to give a perfect score, but it is probably a 10 out of 10. It is a really great product. 

We use CrowdStrike Falcon as our EDR solution, including antivirus.

As Symantec ended its endpoint protection, we were able to roll out CrowdStrike.

It is important to us that CrowdStrike is cloud-based because the way I understand it, that's their main engine for their next-gen EDR solution. The fact that it's cloud-native, flexible, and offers always-on protection is important because we want to have 24-hour monitoring of our environment. It is important to us that we don't have to worry about upgrades.

This product has worked flawlessly to prevent breaches, and then it has allowed us to prevent any downtime.

It has minimized our footprint because having the ability to implement the prevention policies has allowed us to focus on other projects. The prevention policies are working for us.

The most valuable feature is the activity dashboard because it gives you a holistic view of your environment from a security standpoint.

We would like to be able to perform on-demand scanning, rather than relying on the scheduler. Right now, CrowdStrike does not have an on-demand scanner. They have the always-on, but we have found instances where artifacts are being blocked from running, but they're not being removed. With an on-demand scanner, we would have the ability to remove those artifacts from an end user's machine.

I would like to see the multi-site environment functionality added in the next release. Currently, we are working under a single-site environment, and on the roadmap, they mentioned having the ability to have a multi-site environment.

We have been using CrowdStrike Falcon for approximately eight months.

Stability-wise, they are very advanced in the next-gen antivirus game. CrowdStrike Falcon is always available.

We have approximately 5,000 machines that are being managed. As time moves on, this number will grow, but we don't expect it to get larger in the near future.

I would rate the technical support that we received during the deployment, as well as post-deployment, very well. They were very knowledgeable and gave us all of the tools we needed to have a successful deployment.

Prior to Falcon, we were using Symantec antivirus. It was out of date, which is why we replaced it.

It is very easy to deploy the solution's sensor to our endpoints. We use an automated process. 

Our deployment took between two and three months, with paperwork, communication, and roll-out timeframes. Our implementation strategy included using IBM's BigFix application to push to Windows machines, and then we used a solution for the Mac to push it out remotely as well.

Our IT Services team deployed this solution, and they leveraged consultants from CrowdStirke to get the proper packages for the process.

I'm sure that there is administration and upgrades to do, as sensors need to be updated or policies need to be adjusted. We have a group of approximately five people who are security engineers, IT Services, and directors who use it.

With respect to pricing, my suggestion to others is to evaluate the environment and purchase what you need.

We looked at different options, such as Carbon Black, as we were replacing Symantec as our EDR solution, and CrowdStrike was the top winner. CrowdStrike is always on, 24 hours. Analysis, with the prevention and the detection policies, as well as the USB policies, are all very beneficial. The one thing that CrowdStrike did not have is the on-demand scanner.

My advice for anybody who is interested in implementing CrowdStrike Falcon is to review and evaluate your environment and compare their EDR solutions.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We have various use cases. We are protecting servers and endpoints that are utilizing this product to focus on advanced, persistent threats, with the goal of reducing the overhead on the endpoint for early detection.

Right now, we have not put enforcement, and we're moving to the next level of detection.

Using this solution has reduced my need for imaging. We can mitigate the issue and address it immediately, for people both on and off of the network.

The most valuable feature is that we don't need to re-image machines as much as we had to.

They need to strengthen the forensic capabilities of this product, for e-discovery.

We started testing and deploying CrowdStrike Falcon about a year and a half ago, in the early part of 2019.

In terms of stability, it's a great tool.

At this time, we have between 5,000 and 6,000 endpoints.

We have been in touch with CrowdStrike technical support and they have been very supportive.

Prior to CrowdSrike, we used a signature-based solution from Symantec.

The initial setup was very straightforward and very easy. We've been bringing stuff into the SWOT platform and getting that data. It has been pretty good.

The implementation was done in-house. We had, in part, help from a strategic partner, EY.

CrowdStrike is what we did for the time and for the moment. It is number two when you look at the magic quadrant, and we have implemented that for the time being. When we selected it, that was right for us to get away from a Symantec signature-based environment for endpoint detection response.

We have moved over to CrowdStrike for now. When you look at the quadrant, the number one is Microsoft. With Defender built into the operating system, there is less overhead on the endpoint. We will eventually, most likely, migrate to that.

I have experience with Cylance, as well. They gave that the advanced persistent threat leader title, at one point in the market. I implemented that for one client and now, being in this CISO role, I went with CrowdStrike over Cyberreason and Cylance/Blackberry. The main reason for CrowdStrike is the Falcon technologies and what they do with their strategy.

We're moving to Office 365, and it will make sense for me to adopt Microsoft Defender because it's integrated into the platform. One of the differences between Defender versus CrowdStrike or any other of them is that they have to sit outside. Microsoft Defender can go deep down into the kernel, and that's a good thing for the endpoint. You can do a lot and detect a lot, which makes it far safer against advanced persistent threats.

Overall, this product has been pretty good and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use this solution for threat protection and endpoint security.

Recently, we added on CrowdStrike OverWatch and Insightsoftware for better reporting. OverWatch monitors East-West issues that CrowdStrike Protect doesn't see. New next-generation endpoint security doesn't scan your PC. It doesn't scan files nightly. People have to get past that, it's so old school. 

I have 50 end-users, one hundred endpoints, and workers of all types, both in-house and remote workers.

With the addition of Overwatch and the Insight tool, the reporting has gotten better and I've gained some quality insight that helps me remedy compliance issues and maintain security posture; however, in a year and a half, we haven't had an actual positive detection across a hundred endpoints. The reason for that is mostly due to our employee training and the way that our complete security stack is configured. I hope that the way that I've got it configured right now is the sole reason that we literally aren't letting things in.

If the solution sees some issues, it reports them. Even though they're false positives, in a different scenario, what it's reporting could be a threat. Usually, they're just executables that were downloaded and installed by me. That's to be fully expected and maybe they came from a vendor, but it wasn't signed. 

It's given me a level of confidence that my network is secure — the fact that it's not finding anything; however, I am not experiencing the issues that competitors are saying I should be experiencing. I literally have to test it manually to know it's working.

Falcon Protect looks at processes and issues in real-time.

CrowdStrike Falcon by itself does not supply in-depth reporting. 

Falcon Protect does what it does. It's endpoint security — nothing more, nothing less. 

What it does, It does well. However, if you need more information on what it found and how it got there (including board reporting and compliance reporting), that's not there. Some of the other solutions that are available give you that, right out of the box.

I have been using CrowdStrike Falcon for the past year and a half.

We haven't experienced any issues regarding the stability of CrowdStrike Falcon.

CrowdStrike Falcon is scalable. I've only got one hundred endpoints and I know companies that are hundreds of times bigger who use it.

Trying to get somebody on the phone might not always be the easiest thing, but they usually respond in a fairly timely manner. I haven't had any issues where I've needed them to immediately fix things.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give their customer support a rating of nine.

We had a Vipre solution, but it was an On-Prem solution. The server was aging out and the software was up for renewal. It wasn't working well with our remote workers; they're not literally connected to my network so updating them was always a pain-point without a cloud-based solution.

We were going to transition to "cloud" and Vipre just wasn't really up to the level of CrowdStrike at the time.

The deployment literally took about 15 minutes across the wide area network. Regarding configuration, we took a look at it with their tech support and Implementation team. There's literally maybe a dozen settings and we basically maxed them out.

The price of CrowdStrike Falcon is a little high, but it can be negotiated.

If you're thinking about implementing this solution, I would suggest getting Overwatch and Insight along with it. Also, don't be afraid to try and negotiate for a better price.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine.

The reporting is part of the Overwatch and Insight combination. It's doing what we want it to do and it's not causing a lot of overhead. Like I said earlier, maybe we're an anomaly. We don't have a lot of issues on our network.

I like that it's cloud-based instead of on-premise.

I miss a feature for the USB control that they have as an add-on. I haven't gotten to the point where I want to pay for it, but the features that I miss are available.

The biggest issue with Falcon as a standalone product is it doesn't have very much reporting.
Out of the box, the only weakness is the level of reporting.

All the analytics and the telemetry are there, it's just a matter of getting to it. Other vendors offer some of that stuff right out of the box.

CrowdStrike Falcon has been very low maintenance. There are features on it that I haven't touched yet. I've got a SIEM that I haven't really had time to explore fully. I have a patch management system that does what it does. I have a firewall and IDS that do what they do, and I have an endpoint security system that does what it does.

MSPs keep asking how one person can keep up to the different solutions and alerting, if you don't have any problems, then it's pretty easy to keep up. Everything does what it does.  I don't experience any of the issues that apparently a lot of people have on their network. How can I tell you what to improve if it's doing what it's supposed to do? 

I have been using CrowdStrike Falcon since June of 2019. 

The stability is good; we haven't experienced any glitches or bugs.

We're a small company so the scalability is fine for us.

I don't have to talk to their technical support often. When I need help, I contact them by email.  Sometimes it takes a little while to get through to them, but otherwise, when they respond the issue is resolved. Not a real concern. 

We had Vipre business on-premise, the product was being discontinued and I wanted to move away from an on-premise solution.  At the time Vipre did not seem to be quite as mature as other options.  I understand that they have improved quite a bit since I looked at them last.

The initial setup was straightforward. Initial agent deployment took roughly 15 minutes.  SIEM integration required some coordination between vendors, but was relatively uneventful when support teams were involved.

Licensing cost is negotiable. There are no additional costs.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine. I'm sure there's always something that can be improved.

We evaluated Vipre, Carbon Black, and a few others.

There are half a dozen players out there that are the best of the breed. Pick one.

When it came to CrowdStrike versus Carbon Black, configuration and setup were deciding, driving factors. CrowdStrike was much easier to configure, but overall, is it better or worse? I can't make that judgment call.

All I know is what I've been told by other vendors that are trying to get my business. They tell me about issues that I've never encountered with the products that I have. In summary, take what a vendor says about another vendor's product with a grain of salt.

We are using this solution for advanced threat protection, over and above any antivirus for approximately 1200 end-users, or endpoints. It is able to identify any anomalies and alert on that using the AI engine. That way, there's a small security team to make them more effective, to be able to get an alert, go in and look at what's going on. 

Since I have been here, I have been keying into when people fall for phishing attacks and they either get blocked going to a website or their credentials get compromised, and somebody logs in to their Office 365 account. We were able to forensically identify that in two of the cases. Most recently, since I've been here looking at the more active response, to be able to identify and act a little bit more quickly.

I was able to look through some rapid analysis when bad things happen. More so than having to get, especially in the distributed world of post-COVID, being able to have a central place to be able to see what's going on, on the landscape of endpoints at any given time.

The feature that I find to be the most valuable, is being able to look at the system analysis and being able to baseline what is installed on the system. What does it usually do, and is it doing anything differently?

The UI is great, and the performance was great. The way it gathers and presents the information was very good and it integrates well with things with a central log aggregator, such as Splunk. You can do more big data analytics that includes security. It seems to be fully featured in all of those areas.

I think there's an opportunity to enhance the AI or at least the traps to say, if something changes from this baseline, let us know and flag it. It's got a pretty good engine to do that on its own but it's one of the things that are important to us, so I'm just trying to increase the time-to-issue identification.

By comparison to buying into the Microsoft suite, it was definitely less costly. CrowdStrike can be costly.

I have had this solution for approximately three years.

It seems stable. The performance is good.

It's a scalable solution. They are running 1400 endpoints on it right now, and it seems to be fine.

There is only one person working at it right now and they are the security engineer/operator.

If you look at how they spend their day, a tool like that does a lot with a little and can make a one man band pretty effective or much more effective. It makes the response to an issue right when it happens way more possible with such small security. 

We haven't used technical support.

The initial setup was already completed before I started with this company.

When comparing to Microsoft, CrowdStrike Falcon is more expensive.

I'm going by the client and some of the things that are driving their decisions. 

It's typical when Microsoft throws things in and it seems really cheap, even though you're spending a million and a half dollars with them. You may as well increase the value of that million and a half.

My guess is that CrowdStrike is going to maintain parity or stay ahead of Microsoft.

As I came into this organization, they were moving away from CrowdStrike. 

They upgraded their license to E5 with the security bundle from Microsoft. The goal is to start to move things. 

They are paying twice for things right now, but that will be expiring. CrowdStrike comes up for renewal next year, and they want to be off of it by then.

I haven't gone into critiquing it. Since they've already made the decision and made the investment to go to defender ATP. I'm more concerned with, are we losing anything? Do we have parity when we go from one platform to another? And if any gaps emerge, what needs to be filled?

When we did go into it and walked through it with one of the security engineers, it was snappy, and it had a nice UI. 

I had never been inside the product. I think I got a demo years ago in my CSO role, but I had never delved into a practical use case. The practical use case looked pretty cool.

For anyone who is interested in implementing this solution, I would say don't look for the cost compared to smaller applications. Look at what you're trying to do, and what you're trying to accomplish. The typical first cardinal sin of IT is buying a product and then figuring out how to use it as opposed to having a set of requirements, placing a value on that set of requirements, and then pursuing a solution that covers them the best. 

I think they probably said we've got a gap here because something bad happened to my CrowdStrike. It's an industry leader. Three years after the issue that they were treating was over, and the pain was gone, suddenly, it seems really expensive. That is an IT 101 mistake that I've found in organizations, where it's a means to an end and then it turns this to just an eyesore on the balance sheet.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is digital security investigations using the dashboard.

Every week, a manager would look at a detailed report to see what kind of CrowdStrike incidents we had.

The most valuable feature is the indicator of compromise, which shows you what file was either quarantined or removed. It shows you the malicious files in question, as well as the exact time, the machine, the endpoint, and the host IP address. Everything you need to know is right there in a single dashboard.

Any kind of integration that you want to do, such as using the API to connect to a SIEM, is complex and it will be expensive to do. It is quite a pricey product.

I used CrowdStrike Falcon in my last two cybersecurity jobs, over a period of at least two years.

The product is stable as a rock. I have never seen any crashes. When it came to patching updates, we were always notified. It is not Windows-based, but rather Linux or Unix-based. It was more stable than any Windows product.

We had a small shop, so we never had any reason to scale.

The technical support is pretty good. They're trained in their product and they have a system in place where if the first line of support does not resolve the issue, they are emailing us directly back and forth, and they'll hand over the problem from one shift to the next.

It is not very difficult to get in touch with the support team, although it does require clearance from whoever handles the money aspect. You have to be really careful because they will charge you fees for any kind of solution that they provide.

I have used them twice, once for each company that I was working for. The first time, we used the CrowdStrike service to do the investigation so that we could focus our time on other products. They have teams that will act like a managed service provider to take care of incidents. We handled major incidents in-house but we let them handle the minor ones.

With the second company, we had to do the investigations as the incidents came in, so it was two totally separate vantage points. Both worked extremely well in both manners and forms.

CrowdStrike was already in place before I arrived, at both places where I have used it.

We were also using Carbon Black, as well as other tools, but they were not being used to the same degree. I think that we were using Carbon Black for white-listing applications.

I also spent a lot of time using Nessus, which is a vulnerability scanner. I would look at scans to see what kind of vulnerabilities were present, and patch management updates with other teams.

I was not there for the initial setup, but what I did learn was that the implementation team came in and worked with our engineering team. They set it up and then our team verified that all of the endpoints where there and that we had the visibility we needed for all of the subnets in all of the locations.

When I spoke with my teammate, I was told that it was pretty much straightforward and out of the box. The fact that it is a cloud-based deployment made it easier, too.

Our licensing fees were between $50,000 and $60,000 per year, which was pretty expensive for a small business. It is not a one-time payment. Any upgrades that you want to do, you're going to have to pay multiple times.

My advice for anybody who is implementing CrowdStrike Falcon is to get in touch with the vendor and then follow best practices. They have a lot of documentation and everything is there. For the most part, I would suggest looking at the technical support documentation first and then contacting a representative at the vendor to continue the process.

Most companies have it integrated with the SIEM and with their ticketing system, although I did not use it in that capacity because it costs more money.

Most of the time, you're not going to have to lay a finger. Once it finds an infected file, you might have to reboot the computer if it can't immediately remove it, or other such minor stuff. In general, however, it's never given me any issues and it's never given me a headache. Overall, it's very straightforward and just one tool out of the whole.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution as advanced threat protection. It is used to protect all endpoints, servers, etc. 

They're very good at what they do. As far as the product is, in its current state, I don't have any complaints at all right now. They do a quarterly review with us, just so they can let us know how many viruses or how much malware they've stopped, etc. Those features are quite good. They also go through the portal step-by-step to describe whatever they improved or tightened up. They will explain everything clearly and in a way that a customer can understand.

They do also ask for feedback, which is nice. They'll ask things like "The last time we changed this, how was your experience?" or "Did you get a lot of false positives?" or "Did you get any complaints?" etc. That's pretty good. Not many companies do that.

The UI is simple and self-explanatory. Everything is easy to understand.

So far, in the past three years, they've been absolutely great. They've been more proactive than the solution we had previously was. They even introduced new products in their line and they came back and told us that they could add that product to our current solution. At first, we added them, then we decided we had sufficient resources in house to manage it ourselves and removed it. They were great about the change. 

They've caught quite a lot of viruses and malware that have been sent through improper links, which is very reassuring. 

They report any network isolation that has been done on certain endpoints if they detect a malicious file or malware on the device that couldn't be cleaned by automation. They isolate it or us. The end-user can contact the service desk and say, "Hey, I'm not able to surf the internet. I can't do anything, so can you help me?" or we're able to look at the endpoint and see "oh, your PC is infected, that's why you aren't allowed on." It's protecting us well.

Even though the users are somewhere else, even when they're not at headquarters, we are able to remediate everything before we put them on the network again. Those network isolations are great when we detect high threat malicious items. Those are valuable tools that we appreciate.

If an operating system is stopped by support by the original vendor like Microsoft, or maybe Apple, within a few weeks, CrowdStrike will also decide they no longer support it, and they kind of move on. I understand their model. However, if we still have the OS, it's hard to keep it protected. So, for example, if Microsoft decides to stop supporting or patching a solution, Crowdstrike too will stop supporting it and making updates. It's still a useable product, it's just not getting updates or patches and therefore may be vulnerable. 

The result is that we can't guarantee we're going to be able to protect that hardware or operating system. We either have to upgrade to a newer platform, which sometimes is not possible because you have a legacy application. Whatever that constraint is, sometimes we're not able to move things. We still have to rely on other products to support that. That's the only quandary I have with them. 

Basically, they don't cover legacy OS or applications. That's the only issue we're concerned about.

When a file is infected or it detects a ransomware file network, when it does remediate, it should self-heal as Sophos does. That's a good feature to have, but I don't know enough pros and cons about that to kind of recommend that because if it is a false positive, that may be a problem. If it detected a valid file and if for some reason it decides, "Oh, this looks like an infection," and maybe it's not actually infected, and if it goes in and remediates it by replacing it with an older file, that may be a problem. However, I don't know, because I've never used that feature or heard anybody say that's a problem.

I've been using the solution for about three years now.

I have two engineers that regularly watch everything. We all get alerts. We'll see if something gets isolated, or a user will tell us. We isolate the issues and work on them so nothing gets through the endpoints into the system. Within 30 minutes to an hour, an issue can be cleared.

It's therefore very stable. We're able to catch everything before it can get it. It's reliable for sure.

They're so pro-active there's very little intervention that we have to do on our end.

The solution is easily scalable. A company shouldn't have any issues with that aspect of the solution.

Technical support is great. We've never had to contact them at all. Instead, they've always been proactive and reached out to us.

Their quarterly review manager will contact us every three months. They schedule it months ahead and we actually jump on a Zoom or WebEx meeting. They actually go through the improvements, how much detections they go through, all of our features, anything new that has been added, anything they're seeing out in the world in terms of threats, and where we need to tighten up the roles.

They would improve the sensitivity level or they will decrease the sensitivity level for some false positives. For example, they might say "Hey, we detect these, but they're not really a threat because this is just a Word document that's produced in an older format. It's not something that's malicious." Then they would decrease the sensitivity in certain areas, to eliminate the issue going forward. They always ask permission before tweaking anything. They will come to us and say, "this is what we're considering doing it and why we want to do it. Is that okay?" We usually agree to that and then they go ahead and do it.

It's just a phenomenal company. If they ever stopped the way they handle their customer service, then I would probably move on to a different company. So far they've been pretty good. For the last three years, they contacted us always and told us about every aspect of the solution. I don't think I missed a quarterly meeting so far with them due to the fact that it's all been so valuable.

Originally, we had Webroot. We used to get, every so often, a slew of viruses that would get through the cracks. I don't know if Webroot's definition didn't get updated in a timely manner or if they were just delayed in something, however, whatever it was, we used to get that intrusion quite a bit. Then we would patch it and we would have to remediate everything. It wasn't ideal. 

We were looking for a product that would be more proactive than a reactive solution, and after doing a bunch of research, we decided on CrowdStrike. 

The solution's initial setup was very simple. The only thing we had an issue with is our network operation. Is a separate organization that manages it. We have a network operation that we used for 24 hour monitoring. They don't support CrowdStrike and they were not experts in it. They stood us we would have to manage it ourselves. In the beginning, we were kind of worried about it. However, after that initial stage, the simplicity of how to install it, configure it was like a breeze.

We manage the entire solution in house. For maintenance, we have me and two engineers, plus a second level of support. There are around five people altogether.

I'm not sure of the exact cost of the solution. That's a detail our finance department handles.

We did research on Cylance. We looked at Norton as well. We went through a bunch of products and we decided CrowdStrike was probably the most advanced threat protection at that time, which was three years ago. 

One of the products we were looking at is Sophos. The reason we were looking at Sophos is we were purchasing a backup and disaster recovery tool. In that tool, they had a built-in Sophos pack; they integrated Sophos in to protect the backup and replication and recovery. That way, if a backup had infections, for some reason, and they weren't picked up, and it got into our backup product, then Sophos could kick in and pick it up. It has automated remediation, meaning it reverses back the infection before infection if that makes sense.

Sophos has a self-healing technology built into it, which is an AI technology that they invented. We were looking at that because we thought that may be a better product. We were doing some homework on that and trying to figure out more about it. We're still in the process of purchasing a backup and recovery tool, so we're still doing our homework.

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. The last time I checked, it was version 5.6. It is up-to-date, however. I get a report every so often saying, we've updated the sensors, or current version, etc. It's an auto-update and it does that. Whenever it's missing something or it couldn't reach an endpoint, the company will send me a report of that, saying these endpoints are not updated because we couldn't detect it on the network any longer.

The only advice I would say to others considering the solution is, if they have an unsupported operating system or legacy application, to look closely at CrowdStrike to see if the solution actually makes sense for them. This is due to the fact that they're not going to be able to support it. If they have thousands of servers and 20% of them are legacy applications, they may not want to think about CrowdStrike because the solution doesn't support legacy products. Other than that, I fully recommend CrowdStrike. The advanced threat protection they have has always been great.

I'd rate the solution a solid nine out of ten.

I use it for cloud workload protection and threat detection in AWS environments.

The pay-as-you-go model enabled me to deploy quickly from the AWS Marketplace management account.

It scaled protection for workloads without upfront commitments and reduced the initial operational overhead.

It provides real-time visibility into cloud threats, helping stop breaches faster in dynamic AWS setups.

I find the seamless AWS integration and single lightweight agent to have minimal performance impact.

The cloud-native SIEM and runtime security leverages threat intelligence for proactive detection.

Flexible billing through AWS is ideal for startups testing security without long-term locks.

I believe that AI-powered SOAR workflow suggestions could streamline incident response.

I have been using it for 1 month.

We are a new startup, so we did not use any previous solutions.

The pay-as-you-go model excels for startups with variable AWS workloads, avoiding large upfront costs and scaling with usage.

I evaluated Prisma Cloud, Wiz, and Orca Security alongside native AWS options.

CrowdStrike Falcon for AWS (pay-as-you-go) delivers strong cloud-native protection via AWS Marketplace, which is ideal for startups scaling workloads.