UPDATED 15:00 EDT / JUNE 30 2021

CLOUD

Arizona State, CrowdStrike partner for improved cybersecurity, stringent compliance requirements

Even in pre-pandemic times, there was an ever-soaring demand for solutions that can help enterprise players secure their data workloads — both physically and on the cloud. These days, however, cloud SecOps has mostly occupied a sole position as the new wave, and — combined with workers having to work from home as a result of the pandemic — its importance as a requirement for modern businesses has soared.

Another surprise that has been thrown in by the current global predicament is the need for increased collaboration between the public sector (governments) and private sector (enterprises) when it comes to IT-related areas. The synergy between Arizona State and CrowdStrike Inc. is a shining example of how such partnerships can be beneficial across the board.

“Our state CISO, Tim Roemer, has definitely encouraged us to make partners with our private vendors,” said Jennifer Dvorak (pictured, right), information security architect at the State of Arizona. “So, that’s one of his strategic initiatives, and we really want partners in the private sector. We want folks that are going to come alongside us and help us with our security goals. And CrowdStrike has been one of those vendors. We want somebody that’s going to be with us every step of the way. We’ve had some incidents this past year, and CrowdStrike was the first team to alert us because it was a different agency or a different part of our organization that we don’t typically work with a lot.”

Dvorak and Tina Thorstenson (pictured, left), executive public sector strategist at CrowdStrike, spoke with Natalie Erlich, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the 2021 Global Public Sector Partner Awards. They discussed the current state of cloud security products and how they can be beneficial to both enterprise and public data security. (* Disclosure below.)

CrowdStrike explained

During this year’s AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards, CrowdStrike was awarded the “Best Cybersecurity Solution.” It merited the award by tapping on machine learning technologies, proactive threat tracking and behavioral analytics to provide its customers (which includes Arizona State) with improved endpoint and workload protection.

“Essentially, what we’re doing there is the same thing we’ve been doing to protect workloads coming from desktops and laptops across the country and around the world and moved to a model where we’re also, in a zero-trust principles way, looking for threat activity coming in through identities, through people logging into these systems and doing the same real-time continuous monitoring and taking proactive action to protect organizations where we see malicious activity,” Thorstenson stated.

As technologies progress, the cloud is sure to retain its place as a key area for enterprise data and analytics operations. In addition, however, it will simultaneously prove an efficient framework, allowing public safety agencies like the police to respond quicker and more tactfully to threats of all kinds.

“The State of Arizona is a cloud-first state. We are also looking for solutions in the cloud, and I think by leveraging cloud solutions, we’re able to be more nimble,” Dvorak said. “We’re able to pivot our approach to security and address anything that comes up more quickly. So being cloud-first, even though it wasn’t embraced initially, I think that it’s something that we’ve been driving towards and looking for more partners that support that cloud-first initiative that we have.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the 2021 Global Public Sector Partner Awards. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for 2021 Global Public Sector Partner Awards. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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