For some companies it pays to be early, for others it pays to have the right solution regardless of timing. CrowdStrike Inc. has been fortunate to have both.

Since its founding in 2011, CrowdStrike has steadily risen to become a leading independent security firm with over $2 billion in annual revenue. It recognized early on that the cloud would be an important resource for large global businesses that would need a focus on protection.

“Clouds have evolved over time from the simple hosting files and hosting simple workloads to hosting much more complicated workloads,” said George Kurtz, founder, president and chief executive officer of CrowdStrike, during a recent interview with SiliconANGLE. “We’ve evolved with that in protecting those workloads. It may exist for a tenth of a second, but it’s still a workload. Or it may exist as a virtual machine for a couple of years and not be touched. Doesn’t matter; we still have to protect it.”

CrowdStrike’s model will be showcased during the company’s annual Fal.Con gathering in Las Vegas, September 19-20. TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, will be covering the event live with interviews featuring key CrowdStrike executives, customers and partners to learn how the company will evolve in the cybersecurity landscape with its solutions and expanding enterprise ecosystem. (* Disclosure below.)

Check out our event trailer:

Purpose-built security platform

The key for CrowdStrike is its architecture and platform. The company realized from the beginning that it could process telemetry data in the cloud, based on information gathered from a network of lightweight agent/sensors positioned in systems around the world. This allowed it to develop a purpose-built threat graph and analytics platform that can access a robust pool of data in real time and evaluate threats based on an ever-expanding intelligence repository as its model has evolved with the growth of the cloud.

“CrowdStrike started as a specialist in end-point security and has expanded to XDR,” said Dave Vellante, industry analyst for theCUBE. “The company partners with adjacencies through Okta and others. It’s a hot company that is growing nicely. It’s a good success story with lots of room to expand.”

In April, CrowdStrike announced a new managed extended detection and response service, called Falcon Complete XDR, which includes threat hunting, monitoring and end-to-end remediation across all key attack surfaces and leverages artificial intelligence automation.

CrowdStrike has also integrated its XDR technology with Okta Inc.’s FastPass authentication solution to simplify device monitoring and match sensor data with access requests. This helps security administrators apply authentication policies based on trust signals gathered by CrowdStrike. The company is expected to make announcements at the event around its platform and partnerships.

New AI indicators

One area of expansion for CrowdStrike will undoubtedly involve AI. Since the company got its start, it has focused on behavior analysis and attack indicators as a way to determine anomalous activity and rapidly flag unwanted network intruders.

Earlier this year, CrowdStrike unveiled new AI-powered indicators of attack, or IoA, models to combat adversary tradecraft. The company also debuted Charlotte AI, a generative AI chatbot designed to help businesses understand and remediate breaches faster.

The generative AI field has created opportunity and angst within the cybersecurity community. While CrowdStrike has demonstrated how to leverage the technology for more vigilant protection, its CEO has recognized its potential to strengthen the arsenal for malicious actors as well.

“When you look at adversarial AI and generative AI … one of the areas that I think is critical is the ability to actually compress the timeframe for exploitation,” Kurtz said. “You can take something which is very time consuming and specialize and leverage a generative AI model to say, ‘OK, every time there’s a new Microsoft patch that comes out, reverse engineer it, create an exploit and then start to build that into the exploit toolkit that can be monetized as part of the gray market.’ Those are the kinds of things that we’re going to see.”

TheCUBE event livestream

Don’t miss theCUBE’s coverage of Fal.Con from September 19-20. Plus, you can watch theCUBE’s event coverage on-demand after the live event.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch theCUBE’s coverage of Fal.Con, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

SiliconANGLE also has analyst deep dives in our Breaking Analysis podcast, available on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify.

Guests

Stay tuned for theCUBE’s lineup of guests during Fal.Con, as we’ll be talking with executives, industry analysts and organizations at the forefront of cutting-edge technology.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Fal.Con event. Neither CrowdStrike Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: SiliconANGLE