CrowdStrike Falcon Reviews

Our main use case was looking for an endpoint solution that was able to follow our users anywhere. We have over 52,000 employees, and a majority of our people work in various places. Many employees are not in an office every day: They are at a client's sites, some work at home, some are traveling, etc. We really needed something that would give us visibility no matter where and when an employee was working.

It has improved the way that we function by giving visibility to machines that we could not see before. With our previous product, you had to be VPN'd and connected to our network. Now, we can see alerts when people are just working at home. For example, they may have clicked on something that may be malicious, now we can take action and stop things from getting worse at the end of the day with its level of visibility. We have also seen installing CrowdStrike has a lot less resource issues versus what our previous solution had on local machines.

It is very important that our security solutions are cloud-native as continue to grow our company. I have been here for almost three years and we were 40,000 employees then, and we are over 52,000 now three years later. For us, the cloud has been important because we don't have to worry about infrastructure, connectivity, or other things like that to grow our business.

Even as we had to pivot with the pandemic to more employees working from home, we have been able to maintain the same level of security visibility. One of the big concerns for management when the pandemic stated was how we maintain security asking, "What do we have to change for security?" and it was nothing, "Let people go home. Let them work from wherever they need to." We had already taken the remote working ability into our security model. Our security operations did not change anything when employees pivoted from working at client sites (or in offices) to working at home.

As long as the machine is connected to the Internet, and CrowdStrike is running, then it will be on and we will have visibility; no VPNing in or making some type of network connection. CrowdStrike always there and running in the background; for us, that is big. We wanted something that could give us data as long as the machines connected to the Internet and be almost invisible to the employees.

Having this type of security operations gives our management a level of comfort. We know we have ransomware protection and there are automatic actions that will happen to keep those incidents from spreading. As things like SolarWinds or the Microsoft Exchange issues have come out, we have been able to use the CrowdStrike logging to do look backs through the logs that we have been maintaining for over a year to see if there were any indicators of compromise that previously occurred before this was known issue. This has been great for us to be able to report to various management. even if we may have been running a vulnerable version of this for a period of time, e.g., like the SolarWinds software.

The Prevent, EDR, and OverWatch are some of the biggest features for us. They stand out as being useful because:

1. Their high efficacy rate on detecting items.
2. The ability to detect malicious activity and take action with a machine that may not be on our network.
3. Do remediation or automated actions, especially for things like ransomware, where it would automatically stop from running and quarantine the machine.

The introduction of CrowdStrike Overwatch service has reduced security risk. It mines through data by threat hunting. Overwatch has been able to point out things to us that were potentially risky activities going on that probably wouldn't have been detected by our old solution allowing us to take some actions and reduce some risk from that perspective.

They have been able to offer Spotlight and other modules, which is great. They take the information they have and turn it into solutions.

There is so much data in their dashboarding and other stuff like, but there is also still some work to do on, "How do you boil it up to certain higher levels/executives?" There is a lot of good technical detail, but in the position that I sit in, sometimes it is a little hard when I am not in it day in, day out to come to what is the real executive level sorts of things. For example, CrowdStrike shows incidents, but what are the things that I really need to worry about as a CISO at a company? That is the one area for improvement.

Finally, they bought a company that is doing SIEM, which is interesting to me. When I first started with CrowdStrike in my previous organization, four or five years ago, I went to CrowdStrike, and said, "I don't want to have to buy or continue to support our SIEM product. I would rather use you guys. Can I pay you extra money to hold that data and do those things so we can have that functionality? Then, I can get one rid of a solution." At that time, they told me, "No, we're not a SIEM company." I did not like the answer, but I respected it. Now that they bought one, and I am like, "Wow, I guess I was just a few years too early." So, I'm glad to see those sorts of things. I am glad to see them evolving into those areas where I saw it years ago, where they are strong, and displace others.

I would love to see more investment in Insight because CrowdStrike have an opportunity to potentially displace some of the vulnerability management vendors with the visibility they can see over time. I want to see them continue to evolve, e.g., what other things can they disrupt which are operational things we have to continue to do as an organization. Then, I can have less vendors and put more effort into one solution that we really want to operationalize.

I have been using it for two years at this organization. I also used it for about two years when I was at my previous organization. So, I have used it for four years in total. There was a little lull in-between when I came over to this organization as their CISO, because they were on another product and then we ended up switching in 2019 to CrowdStrike.

I have never had an issue with stability at my current organization. At my previous employer, there was one issue with an auto upgrade where it caused some issues, but it was resolved quickly.

CrowdStrike is a vast improvement compared to our previous solution, where we had to spend a lot of time. For example, when the client had to be upgraded, it was a three-to-six-month project with people having to spend dedicated time to roll it out in waves, then deal with issues when a client's machine didn't upgrade correctly. Now, upgrades happen automatically. We turned auto updates on and have never needed to look back. Nobody has to spend any time on it.

I honestly cannot tell you the last time I have heard about a CrowdStrike agent issue causing an outage on a machine or server at the end of the day.

We have had no problems with scalability. CrowdStrike can scale as much as we need them to, they are the ones taking care of all the cloud, hosting, and processing on their end. So, we have never had an issue where we have seen a degradation in alerting timing, etc.

There are probably 10 to 15 people who access CrowdStrike or use its data regularly. It is funny because our IT people will use it to try to look for things that aren't necessarily security sorts of things, for example, "Hey, this isn't working," or, "That isn't loading," because of the level of visibility CrowdStrike has in some of the processing item. We have four or five people on the SOC. There are probably 20 or 30 accounts in there, but for the ones which are used regularly, it is probably about half that amount, like seven to 10.

My experience with the technical support has been great. Part of it is also the level of access that I have at CrowdStrike. I have been on their advisory board since the beginning and a customer. I participated in a panel at one of their last in-person sales kickoff with their CEO. I remember when the company was 200 to 300 employees and there were 1200 or 1300 at their sales kickoff.

For monitoring it, we have an outsourced IT provider (our partner) who has security operation center people. They are the ones who are really responding to the alerts at the end of the day. I think there are four or five people who cover the 24-hour time shifts.

This solution has been not nearly as compute resource heavy as some of our previous solutions. Compared to our previous solution, CrowdStrike is a lot easier to use, easier to get information out of it, and you are getting it in more real-time.

Deploying CrowdStrike's sensors to our endpoints has been fairly easy. You can do tens of thousands of hosts in less than a day. I know of another organization who deployed 60,000 endpoints over a weekend.

Each organization has to look how its IT operations function. We did our deployment in a phased approach, with lower risk systems and servers first. If you had an issue, then you could easily roll it back. Then, we rolled it out into more regions and higher risk things.

We had a desktop management employee pushing it out, then another person in our security operations center validating endpoints numbers. It is really having your support desk know as well as having your people who run endpoint management.

For monitoring it, we have an outsourced IT provider (our partner) who has security operation center people operating the solution 24/5. They are the ones who are really responding to the alerts at the end of the day. I think there are four or five people who cover the 24-hour time shift.

The amount of compute resourcing used on a machine has been significantly less than the previous produce. The biggest ROI is the operational cost reduction. We would have a project manager spend three months to roll out an upgrade of a very heavyweight, security endpoint client. At the end of the day, this could cause a one to two percent error rate where machines would have an issue, then we would need to have a tech spend a lot of time on correcting this versus having automatic updates now that take care of themselves.

You are looking at saving six to seven months of a person's time, collectively, which would have been spent on just doing this one function alone.

Years ago, when we bought CrowdStrike, you got everything it had. I was a little concerned when they broke this out into a la carte modules where you can buy EDR, Spotlight, etc., picking and choosing off the menu. I was a little worried that the solution would get watered down. However, I realized in my previous organization when we had the full suite that there were a bunch of features in it that we didn't have time to operationalize. So, I warmed up to it. I get the whole, "Look, you can pick and choose. Okay, everybody buys a steak, but do you want mashed potatoes, or do you want lobster mac and cheese?" So, you can pick the sides that you want, so you can buy the solution that you want and operationalize versus paying a lot of money and getting a bunch of things, but not using 60 percent of the tools in the box.

There are licensing and maintenance fees.

At my previous company, I did a PoC. The guy who led all the Midwest sales was somebody I knew for around a decade. So, it was, "Hey, I want to try this out because it sounds interesting." So, it was fairly easy. You got the trial. You installed it, then you connected to their cloud portal. That was it. You opened it up to be able to communicate to port 443 outbound, and that was it. It was super easy to get CrowdStrike up and running.

The PoC was important because we were able to test \ and see visibility that we weren't able to before when a system was off-network, just sitting at home, connected on an Internet, and not VPN'd in. It was those sorts of things where, "Look, this is what we can see now that we couldn't see before," as a result of doing that trial.

At my current company, we did not do any type of trial because of past experience. We did test but then just started kind of rolling it out because our other product was just too heavy to continue to operationalize.

In my previous organization had very much the same issue that my current one had. We had an endpoint solution where you didn't get any alerting from the endpoint security if you were off-network. We had salespeople who traveled, and even more people connected via VPNs, which was common. A lot of things were internal, but we were shifting to some cloud-based things. We had the issue where a salesperson connected to the network every once in a while, and we wouldn't see the alerts. By the time we got the alert, it's well past and who knows what has happened. Therefore, I started doing some searching on the Internet and found the company, CrowdStrike. I looked it up and was like, "Oh, a friend of mine, in sales, was there." So, I called him up and said, "Hey, can we talk?" That is where it started.

We continue to look at other solutions such as what Microsoft has to offer. Some of it is part of our licensing and some of it is not. We continue to listen to some of the other players who are out there such as Cylance and SentinelOne. When I first looked for CrowdStrike, there was nobody else in this market space who was doing endpoint security purely from the cloud. Even when I talked to our previous solution provider about the cloud their answer was, "Oh, we can put servers on Amazon." I told them, "No, I don't want to have to manage servers, period. I want the provider to take care of this. We'll pay for that." That was kind of this weird notion for them to be a truly software as a service model. Now, it is common, and everybody is doing this service model.

A number of other solutions have caught up, mainly by copying CrowdStrike’s cloud-first framework model. A lot of them have been catching up from that perspective overall. Now, it has become a little bit of a crowded field and much more of a commodity but CrowdStrike was the industry leader when we were making our decision.

CrowdStrike is currently across all our technology stack, servers, and workstations.

When we did our proof-of-concept testing, our administrators liked that installing it was easy and did not need to reboot the system (and causing an outage). Our administrators also loved that once they did this, they didn’t have to deal with doing client upgrades once or twice a year, where you have to take servers down and reboot them. You install this once, and now you won't have to worry about this ever again. I sold this to administrators as, "You want me to make your life easier? Here is the one thing you need to do." Now, they reap the benefits.

We are looking at the cloud workload options over a course of time, as more technologies shift to cloud and we acquire other companies with more endpoints. From that perspective, we will continue to look at some of the other modules that they have but operationalizing some of modules are not in our risk profile. Some of the modules don't add as much value as they would to some other companies depending on their risk exposures.

We will look into the solution’s Horizon module in the future.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10.

It is currently our antivirus and EDR platform that we use to export incidents to our SIEM and automation platform, SOAR. We use Demisto for our SOAR.

The solution is fully deployed in our organization. We are primarily Windows. There are four major hospital sites with a couple thousand endpoints each. We probably have 600 remote workers due to COVID-19. I would probably say there are 7,000 VDIs inside of Citrix. Then, the rest are probably small clinical sites with no more than 50 to 80 people at each one. They make up the bulk of the rest, and probably 99 percent of that is Windows or server-based. We only have maybe 30 Macintoshes in the whole system and about as many Linuxen.

We are using Windows agent 618.

It talks to a lot of our other systems. It allows us to correlate data between our firewalls. This way, we can connect whether network activity is relating to an endpoint detection for faster correlation. It provides more data about the endpoint quicker than if we were to go out to the endpoint and collect that data manually. In general, I see that it speeds up our playbooks pretty dramatically, as far as our workflow.

We have what we call our phishing playbook. It is an all-in-one, where an email comes into the organization, a user reports it to us, it comes into our automation platform, and then it kicks off a whole bunch of other stuff. For the phishing playbook (which does have a malware component to it) to go out to all the individual tools, that could have taken two and a half hours for it to run the entire phishing book manually, going to all those individual pieces. Now, we can have one done in 15 minutes. The phishing playbook is a catch-all that has multiple systems in there too. As far as collecting data from many different parts, it speeds that up. In general, we have noticed time savings. 

I would give them probably about as high as I would be willing to give any organization. I would give them an eight out of 10, as far as their effectiveness, for preventing breaches. In general, we feel more secure knowing that we are not relying on multiple different technologies to provide a different kind of protection. We were using a couple other different pieces of software to do a portion of what CrowdStrike is doing for us. We are getting a more comprehensive protection, which is good.

We like the ability that if there is an issue at a third-party clinic that is affiliated with us in some way, then we can go in there quickly and install our agent, protecting them if something were to happen. For example, we had at doctor's offices where there were phishing incidents, then we went in there and installed the CrowdStrike agent. 

I like the herd immunity, their Falcon X version. If another organization somewhere else gets hit by a piece of malware that has not been seen before, we will get that protection in however long it takes them to analyze it and push that detection to everybody else. I find that extremely helpful.

The second most useful feature to me is the intelligence modules.

I like the dashboard nature of it. Everything is clickable, linkable, and information is easy to obtain and find. How it presents that information is probably the biggest win as far as the information correlation aspect. The presentation of it is very good.

When we first went to CrowdStrike and purchased it, a lot of my team members all had the same issue: There was too much information. Initially, when the user logged in, they were getting dumped on, like a five-gallon bucket of ice. Trying to sort through it all, you can get lost easily. Until you have really had time in the solution to really digest how to use things, it is information overload. We didn't get that from Palo Alto XDR.

I would like them to improve the correlation of data in the search algorithms. When we run an investigation, malware, phishing, etc., I want to look at multiple endpoints at once to correlate that data to see the likenesses, e.g., how are they not alike or what systems and processes are running across those systems? I don't want to have to run the same search in their Spotlight module five, 10, 15, or 100 times to get 100 different results, copy that data out, and then correlate it on my own. In a very simple way, I want to be able to load up a comma-delimited list giving me the spotlight data on these X amount of hosts, letting me search for it quickly. We have had to go back to CrowdStrike, and say, "Our search are taking far too long for even one host." They did bump up the cores and that did improve performance, but it is still kind of slow to get that Spotlight data. That is probably our biggest pain point. I think that needs some help. I understand this kind of information access is probably not the easiest thing to do. It is probably a big ask depending on how their back-end is setup. 

We have been using it since about June of last year. That is around when we officially purchased it, but we had been running it as a PoC since about March or April of last year.

The stability has been fantastic. I have had no stability issues at all. It has never caused a problem of any sort that we have had across in the organization for a PC "acting funny" kind of ticket coming in. Those have never been CrowdStrike agents.

Because this is a cloud-native solution, it provides us with flexibility and always-on protection. That is just the nature of what SaaS applications are. In a very general sense, I wasn't looking at CrowdStrike because it is a SaaS application. That has been a minor point to me. Just one of those, "Oh yeah, your SaaS." It is almost expected nowadays with a lot of your more modern XDR platforms that it has to be always-on, 99.999 percent uptime.

As far as general maintenance, it makes it a bit easier as far as overhead. If there were servers onsite, we would have to take care of those as well as the care and feeding of them. Making it SaaS does make it easier, which provides us some extra man-hours as far as taking care of the hardware behind running it. There is that added benefit, which is nice. The configuration of the agents probably makes it a bit more automated, so that is nice as well. These are just secondary points to me. If we had to do the maintenance, I would be perfectly happy with doing it.

All our security team monitors it. There are five of us in the console daily actively using it. I am probably the only true administrator who will change policies or anything like that in there.

A couple people have access outside of the security team, but I have not seen them login. We have a couple of our server admins have access where they have view rights, but they don't go in because they don't have issues. One or two people on our Citrix team have access, but they don't go in either. Also, one or two of our end users might have access.

The scalability has been fast and easy. We did so many endpoints very quickly without any issues.

It is fully deployed across our organization. We can't really expand anymore unless we are adding/buying clinics.

Now that we are a full-on customer, CrowdStrike technical support has always been spot on. It is one of the best that we have. It is way better than Microsoft and many other pieces of software out there. In my personal experience with the technical support, it is one of the best that we have had. That could be because we have an awesome TAM and great customer service manager. If I reach out to them, then they are on top of things.

One factor behind why we chose CrowdStrike is that we were getting rid of multiple agents to go to one CrowdStrike agent. When we had Carbon Black Protection previously, they were ripping us off. It was a lot. We are paying substantially less with CrowdStrike. Carbon Black Protection is only for application whitelisting, and that is all it does. It is not AV. It is not anything else. That was just one piece of software that we were using. So, getting rid of Carbon Black Protection more than paid for CrowdStrike, and then some.

We were also previously using Microsoft SCEP.

There was a slight decrease in lag time when we removed Carbon Black and put CrowdStrike on, but CrowdStrike moved it back up slightly. However, it was still less than the Carbon Black agent. We did see a slight performance increase with the OnBase application, which is linked to Epic.

CrowdStrike requires tuning out-of-the-box. When we first installed, we set the protections and configurations as recommended from CrowdStrike. We were getting absolutely inundated by detections and incidents. It required probably about a month or two of tuning to really dial into the number of what we would call, "expected incidents". Even now, I would say about 90 percent of what we see are probably false positives, but they are false positives that make us scratch our head, and say, "Is this really something or not?" These are not, "Oh hey, this is Windows Media Player that is getting flagged." These are legitimate false positives worth the investigation, but it takes some dialing in. 

It was exceedingly easy to deploy the solution’s sensor to our endpoints. We had zero issues. We used Microsoft SCCM. We programmed the string and all the commands, then we were off to the races. We programmed one SCCM job by GPO to do all of it. We had 14 total failures, which we found out later was not a CrowdStrike issue. It was an endpoint issue for those failures. Across 20,000-plus endpoints, 14 failures is really good. We deployed it in five days. That includes production servers, test servers, medical endpoints, etc.

The PoC deployment was only 25 endpoints. It was just downloading the agent, then manually installing it. That was a 48-megabyte install. It took two minutes, click two check boxes, enter a string, and you're off to the races. The test install was super easy too.

Our implementation strategy was probably the same as many other organizations. We did the workstations and laptops first, then we did test servers followed by the production servers. 

We had to tailor how many agents we were pushing out at a time via SCCM. The way we had built our job, it was doing a CrowdStrike install, but it was also uninstalling a couple of other pieces. It was having issues on that uninstalled portion. So, the SCCM job would fail. Then, we would get a kind of success where CrowdStrike was installed, but it had failed to uninstall the other portion. Therefore, it was a strange kind of limbo where CrowdStrike and Carbon Black did not play well together at all, like it would absolutely just fail. For example, we had a couple instances where they were both on a machine at once, so we had to tailor how many machines we were doing in a time break, e.g., every 30 minutes, we were doing 500 machines. Every 30 minutes is essentially what we did for a couple of days at a time during business hours so we could monitor it.

It was just the SCCM guy and monitoring it like a hawk. That is all we did for those five days. We just watched it. He was the one doing all the work. He programmed the job and everything. I just gave him the code and watched the CrowdStrike console. If necessary, I went into Carbon Black and manually uninstalled it from there too.

The only help I had from CrowdStrike was to confirm this would work in Citrix. For example: 

• Do we have the correct install language for Citrix? Because the VDI requires a couple of different switches turned on. 
• Is SCCM going to work?  
• Does this look right to you? 

We just basically had them bless it off, "Yeah, it says right here in the manual that this is good." We kind of followed the manual, then we had no issues. However, we just wanted to make sure about that Citrix VDI. So, we did have them actually look at that and make sure that the switches were good.

Agent overhead on the systems has been lowered slightly. We haven't had any tickets coming in, saying, "Oh no, CrowdStrike is messing up my PC. Come fix it." We had this with Carbon Black Protection. It has cut down on the number of support requests for other teams. 

I can't even talk about performance overhead, which is good. Our Citrix team hasn't noticed any extra increases in their Citrix workloads, as far as Citrix Server usage overhead, because we also deploy the CrowdStrike agent virtually. It has not slowed down any of the clinical applications, which was a huge win. If it had slowed down any of our clinical applications, especially the more time-sensitive ones, then it would have been a no-go. It would have been a red flag, "You're out the door," and it did not slow any of them down.

We saw ROI by removing Carbon Black Protection, which costs way more than CrowdStrike costs us. Right there, we already earned back and saved money by removing that solution. Turning off Carbon Black Protection and Microsoft SCEP AV were a huge amount of system overhead saved. Easily coordinating between multiple different pieces of software and gathering that information quickly was another time save. 

I am saving at least an hour or two a day by not having to go into Carbon Black Protection to figure out some sort of strange whitelisting issue.

One part that I don't like about CrowdStrike is that you have to pay for the extra feature of Falcon X. I don't like the a la carte nature of it. I do find that feature to be one of the most useful.

The pricing and licensing are reasonable. I don't think we are getting charged more than what it is worth. It is fair, but I do not like how it is a la carte. I realize they do that so other organizations can buy and get the agent, getting it cheaper than you could otherwise.
However, if you want the main core package, which has all the main features with the exception of maybe the multi-cloud protections, that can get pricier for an organization. So, you have to pick and choose what you want. I do not care for a la carte pricing.

We had contacted one of our software vendors, who put us in contact with CrowdStrike directly. We did a PoC for about 60 days. This was right at the COVID-19 kickoff. They weren't as strict on the 14 days, then you are done. They said, "Use it for as long as you like." 

Getting the free trial was super easy. As soon as they spun it up in the cloud, they said, "Here is your login information. Soon as you get your agent, here is the connection string that you will need with this agent when you have run your install." Done. 

When I got the go ahead from my director that we had officially purchased it, I was able to fully deploy to our 22,000-plus endpoints in five days. We had a full deployment in five days.

The free trial was critical. I don't think we would have gone with it if we had not been able to at least kick the tires on it some. We had to make sure that it wasn't going to interfere with our medical applications that are time sensitive.

The other major vendor that we were looking at besides CrowdStrike was Palo Alto XDR. CrowdStrike is a more mature product than Palo XDR, but with that goes some bureaucratic sluggishness. I personally had some issues with CrowdStrike, as far as getting support in a timely manner when I was still a trial customer. Now, as a full-on customer, I don't have any of those issues as far as slow support. They are always very on top of things. But as a test drive, it took far too long getting any support to get a user reset and logged into the platform. It took days. I was very upset about that. However, with that maturity, you have your full built-in intelligence module, which is one of their big selling points. It was fantastic having all that data.

Palo Alto XDR probably had more out-of-the-box API integrations that we use, because we use the Palo Alto XSOAR. It would have linked immediately and perfectly right out-of-the-box. Basically, with a click of a button, it would have been on. A majority of our security work comes from XSOAR. That would have been a huge win. Because of legal issues, CrowdStrike and XSOAR have an API link, but it is not terribly useful or intuitive to use without a lot of customization. Unfortunately, with a small team, nobody really has time to dig into the API and do all sorts of customization, trying to program it to get it to be just right. We have too much more operational work to do.

Other than that, the protections between the two are equal. I didn't see any decrease in that. I would just say CrowdStrike was more feature-based, and that Palo Alto's feature-base wasn't fully quite there yet. Things were a little bit more intuitive to me on the Palo Alto product than the CrowdStrike product. However, the maturity of the CrowdStrike product eventually won out.

I personally liked the Palo Alto product a little bit better than CrowdStrike because I could see where it was going. It was a difference of GUIs, essentially. With the recent updates from CrowdStrike, it has made this a little bit better.

Our CIO had a previous good experience with CrowdStrike. That was the reason why we went with CrowdStrike over XDR. Essentially, what it boiled down to, someone with a higher pay grade above me had a previous good experience.

We just signed a contract with an organization for another piece of software to do our multi-cloud protection.

We get a lot of our ideas for software that we want to take for a test drive through Magic Quadrant reports.

It being SaaS was of no importance to me. If I wanted the solution, then had to build an on-site server for it or not, that makes no difference to me. I know for some people who have overhead, that is where it matters. Personally, it does not at our organization. I was more interested in getting the best of breed.

CrowdStrike Store is pretty interesting and always intrigues me. It typically will take you to another vendor's website for another piece of software that you would have to buy and install. So, it is one of those things like, "Oh, that is nice to know that you integrate with these other people. But, we don't have money right now to be looking at these other people's software that easily integrates but still requires their own agent to be installed on the PC." It is kind of an advertisement shop saying we work well with these other pieces of software.

Try it. Try all the features. Because if you go with a trial and don't try all the features, then you are not going to know if it's going to work for you or not. Try everything that you possibly can. I know some organizations who will "try it" and install it, but they won't do anything with it. In this case, we actually did. We actually tried to use all the features and create issues. We tried to kick the system over, and it didn't. 

Biggest lesson learnt: Rely more on our technology, trust our processes, and trust the software more. I think that is just an organization maturing from an old-school antivirus and application whitelisting/blacklisting mentality to a next-generation antivirus mentality, where you are trusting your software to operate. You are trusting your processes and playbooks to run automatically. As we matured and went with CrowdStrike, we are now relying more on our automated processes to run.

I would give it an eight out of 10. There are areas of improvement, especially with the search because it's a time burden and causes issues for our team. Other than that, everything else that we are getting has been fantastic. It is great overall.

I have been surprised by the new features coming out. When they add a new feature to an agent release, it doesn't seem pell-mell. They have a thoughtful consideration to what they are adding. The upgrade schedule is not overly burdensome nor is their path for pushing out those new features burdensome. We can keep up with them. So, they are not pushing out 20 features on one agent and none for the next 10 iterations, and then another 20. It's one or two every couple of iterations. It is trickling, which makes it easier to test things and run them through our CAB. That has been helpful.

We use this product for endpoint security and threat remediation.

The fact that this is a cloud-native solution that provides us with flexibility and always-on protection is absolutely important, especially with a good majority of our staff working remotely, now.

We've had security incidents that occurred and within a matter of just a couple of minutes, they were completely remediated and fixed and we didn't even have to think about it. We just got the report after the fact.

Falcon's ability to prevent breaches is excellent. It's affected us in that we haven't had any downtime as a result of breaches or any malware or anything like that. Ultimately, it's given us a lot of our time back. On the IT side, this is at least five to ten hours per week. On the user side, it is probably more.

The most valuable feature is threat remediation. We have a small IT Team, and this allows us to get sleep at night, knowing that someone else is taking care of any incidents that occur.

CrowdStrike takes care of all of the updates, so we don't even think about it or see it. This is great because we definitely spent a lot of time doing that kind of thing with our previous solution. Now that we haven't had to do it in four months, it's not even something we consider anymore.

We use both the endpoint and cloud workload protection and the detection and prevention it provides are excellent. It's tuned well to the fact that there can be a lot of false positives, so there's not a lot of potential issues that we're getting alerted about that aren't real. This means that when we do get alerts, we know that they're real and they're already being remediated for us.

It would be nice if the dashboard had some more information upfront, and looked a little better. Having a cooler dashboard is nice to have, although it is not as important as the functionality, which is very good.

I have been using CrowdStrike Falcon for approximately four months.

The stability is great and we haven't had a single issue.

It was originally deployed to 200 users and we haven't really grown since we started, so I can't speak to scalability. This represents 100% adoption in our organization, and there are no current plans to grow. As we hire more people, our usage will increase.

There are two people who work with it on a daily basis. There is the director of IT and a network administrator.

The technical support is excellent. I've only used it a couple of times and they were extremely responsive and very fast.

Prior to implementing CrowdStrike, we used BlackBerry Cylance. We switched for the ability to have full remediation so that we didn't have to do it ourselves. Also, this product is pretty much best-in-class for endpoint protection.

The only real difference that we have found with CrowdStrike, compared to Cylance, is that we no longer have to spend time remediating our issues. The detection and prevention capabilities are similar, although, with CrowdStrike, we have fewer false positives.

The initial setup is extremely easy. It took me about five minutes to deploy it to my entire organization of about 200 users. The single-center process is extremely important because it's something that we were worried about, but it turned out to be a non-issue because it only took five minutes and we haven't had to think about it again.

We initially had a plan for deployment but once we found out how easy it really turned out to be, it was basically a one-step plan.

Our return on investment comes from the fact that there is less downtime for people that do get malware and other such problems. That is something that can be quantified.

We made use of the free trial and the process for getting set up was extremely easy. We spoke to our sales rep and in our discussions and demos, they offered the free trial. We accepted, they sent me a link and I downloaded the agent. I was then able to install it and login in less than five minutes.

Having the free trial was very important in making our decision to implement CrowdStrike because without being able to test it, it's not something that we would have chosen.

The pricing is definitely high but you get what you pay for, and it's not so high that it prices itself out of the market. That said, it's definitely one of the highest. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees and the fact that it's keeping us safe, and it's proven that it works, is worth it.

We evaluated solutions from several vendors including Sophos, Trend Micro, McAfee, Kaspersky, and perhaps another one. A lot of these other endpoint solutions don't offer a full remediation option, and that was a big deal for us.

Also, reputation was important. We had used a couple of others in the past and there were issues where they would make an update that would negatively affect all of our computers. For example, our users could no longer access certain important websites. We haven't had that problem with CrowdStrike.

In terms of ease of use, CrowdStrike is extremely easy. Comparatively, we've had less time in the administration console than we have previously.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing CrowdStrike is to go ahead and do it. There is nothing to worry about and they deliver as promised.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case for the product is to enhance our threat intelligence capabilities. We use it to ensure comprehensive security coverage.

The solution has significantly improved our threat detection capabilities. It has helped us identify and respond to potential threats more effectively, contributing to our security posture. There have been no notable drawbacks; the solution meets our needs and complies with local regulations.

The product's most valuable features include its global reach and extensive threat data. Its wide exposure helps gather diverse threat intelligence, crucial for effective security management.

Enhancements in reporting and forensic analysis could benefit the product. CrowdStrike could publish detailed threat reports and analyses more consistently than other providers.

I have been using CrowdStrike Falcon Threat Intelligence since early 2016.

I rate the platform's stability an eight. 

The platform is very scalable. It can effectively accommodate growing security needs, which is crucial for organizations with evolving threat landscapes.

Customer service and support vary based on the level of service. Premium support is excellent, but standard support can be less responsive.

Neutral

We previously used a different solution. We switched to CrowdStrike due to its comprehensive threat intelligence capabilities and global reach, which we found to be more effective for our needs.

The initial setup was straightforward, with the installation taking less than two hours. However, fine-tuning alerts and configuring rules required additional time and effort.

The implementation was carried out in-house.

The product has helped us detect threats that might have gone unnoticed, contributing to overall security.

The product is expensive. 

We evaluated several other options before choosing CrowdStrike. Our decision was based on the product's effectiveness and ability to meet our security requirements.

Overall, it is a robust solution that meets our security needs. However, potential users should know the cost implications and ensure the product meets their requirements.

I rate it an eight. 

The solution is for alerts. It will trigger if there is malicious traffic or some scripting attack. Any attack that is there, then it'll alert automatically.

We can protect against the worst level of attacks. We can see everything from the dashboard.

The vulnerability monitoring is great.

It's very easy to set up.

The performance could be better. It's a bit slow. When we click to launch the dashboard, it should be more responsive.

I've been using the solution for the last six months. 

The performance could be better. It's a little bit slow. 

It's not very stable. We can't seem to support the latest version.

We don't really handle the scaling. I can't speak to that aspect of the product.

We have about 300 to 400 agents running.

Technical support is great.

Positive

We did previously use a different solution. The security team made the decision to switch. It wasn't a decision from an operations standpoint. 

We just install the agent and whatever other notes you need to monitor.

It is straightforward to set up the solution. 

There's no deployment. We just run the agents and those will take care the deployments. The security team will take care of the deployment part. Therefore, we just install the agents and hand over the environment to them. They will monitor everything.

We don't need any outside help, really. Mostly they will give you the links and how you need to deploy everything. Based on that information, we'll follow that advice.

I'm not sure of the exact cost of the solution. 

We are on the latest update of the solution. 

There isn't really any specific knowledge required to use CrowdStrike, apart from maybe general knowledge of cyber security.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. If it had better performance, I would rate it higher. 

We use this solution on all of our endpoints and servers.

The solution has improved my organization by automating the detection and reporting of unwanted applications so we're aware of them and can respond appropriately.

The most valuable features of the solution are the detection and prevention of unwanted applications and malware services.

The solution keeps changing their website to the point that it's hard to navigate. Also, the technical support is kind of hit-or-miss. Sometimes they really respond quickly and sometimes I don't hear from them for a long time.

I began using this solution when I was hired at this company about 10 months ago, and they were using it before that.

The solution looks very stable. 

It is a scalable product. 

The technical support team often just replies to an issue with a link to an article rather than actually calling back and talking to someone and making sure the problem is solved. To me, that's kind of weak.

Neutral

The initial setup was complex. On a scale of one to five, with one being complicated and five being very easy, I would rate it about a three.

The deployment was handled in-house.

The licensing cost isn't cheap, but it's appropriate. 

My advice to those looking into this solution would be that it's in the top right quadrant of the Gartner quadrant, so it deserves consideration. You just have to be prepared to integrate it.

I would rate this solution as a four out of ten. This is mostly because of the weak technical support.

We use CrowdStrike for endpoint protection. 

As an EDR tool, we can integrate log management and event management. The solution deals with threats automatically, that's the advantage. 

I would like to see equal support across all versions. Aside from that, I would say most of the features are there. 

We have been working with the solution for six months. 

Yes, CrowdStrike is stable.

The solution is scalable, we have 1900 users. 

We have only required our local support, they have been sufficient for our needs. 

We previously used a Symantec product, but there was no local vendor support so we switched to CrowdStrike Falcon. 

The initial setup is straightforward, we deployed in two to three weeks. 

We implemented the solution through our vendor, they proposed the solution. 

As the solution is a preventative measure, it's hard to say exactly what the ROI is. 

We have a yearly subscription and find the price to be good. I'd give it a rating of four out of five for price, we got a good discount. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. There is still some grey area for us, as we haven't been using the product long enough to give a full evaluation of all the features. 

We use the solution for security and in demonstrations to our partners.

The EDR is amazing and ease of integration with Splunk is a big plus. Integration with BigQuery is also a plus for me and workflow creation is easy. Overall, CrowdStrike Falcon is a great product.

I have experience with a product called SentinelOne, which has a feature that allows for the customization of query languages. I would like to see such a feature for CrowdStrike. 

I want to be able to create independent groups, each managed by its own admin, so I can isolate the group I use for demonstration purposes.

I have heard about CrowdStrike collecting personal information for marketing purposes, but that's not something I was looking for.

I've been using this solution for about six months.

The stability of the solution varies, several weeks ago I had some difficulties deploying CrowdStrike. It may have been a bug in the latest update, but a few days later this problem was solved. Sometimes there are issues and CrowdStrike deals with them very quickly. 

It amazes me. For instance, we have an end-user with 15,000 users right now and we deployed it in one week. It's a very short time considering other solutions, some of which can take one to two years to deploy completely.

I have contacted customer support four times and they have a very quick response time which is really satisfying. I believe the support team is good.  

Positive

It's pretty straightforward but with Linux if there is a kernel conflict, you may have to change your kernel version and then restart. I can't say with certainty that you won't need to restart during installation. 
It took us 15 minutes to deploy the solution for eight users. 

I personally implemented the product.

In a week

It's an expensive solution but you get a very good product for the price. Since having threat hunters and analysts cost much more than the product itself. Compared to other products, SentinelOne is definitely cheaper and the Microsoft E5 package is probably more expensive. Not many companies are willing to purchase CrowdStrike Falcon in our region due to the cost, but the market is changing. Brand awareness is increasing day by day along with the knowledge of what CrowdStrike is capable of by users and user candidates.
This solution, as well as other EDR tools, are selling slowly in our region but this will speed up in the near future. Some companies are already asking for an MSSP version of the product. 

Our end-users and partners want to know which data are going to be collected. Financial institutions need to know what is included in the telemetry data.
As a distributor, in our region it's mandatory for us to implement, as it wouldn't make sense for us to go to partners and end users with other solutions.