Cloudflare and CrowdStrike partner to accelerate the transition to zero trust security

Cloudflare and CrowdStrike today announced an extended partnership to help businesses adopt a zero trust security philosophy.

The announcement comes less than a year after the White House issued an Executive Order detailing various measures to improve the nation’s cybersecurity – one of which is that all Federal Agencies must adopt a zero trust architecture. . The Law itself came in response to a growing number of malicious cyber campaigns threatening both the public and private sectors, including attacks on SolarWinds ’supply chain.

The concept of “zero trust” is built around the idea that traditional security practices are built on the assumption that everything within an organization’s own perimeter is secure, so it can be “trusted.” But clearly that’s not the case, because bad actors – both external and internal – can cause confusion if they have access to a company’s network. Zero trust does exactly what it says on the box-there is no implicit trust, and every interaction from each endpoint needs to be verified through a robust authentication mechanism.

Zero trust transition

A Forrester report commissioned by Cloudflare from 2020 indicates that while more than three -quarters of businesses want to speed up their transition to a zero trust security architecture, technical challenges have prevented them from doing so – including the complexities around identity and access management (IAM). And this is where Cloudflare and CrowdStrike come into the fight.

The duo, who collectively specialize in web infrastructure and cybersecurity, are introducing a range of integrations to ensure that only the right people get access to critical applications and systems. Cloudflare’s Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) and Secure Web Gateway (SWG), for example, are now integrated into CrowdStrike’s Falcon Zero Trust Assessment (ZTA), allowing conditional access to applications from any endpoint, regardless of the user or their location.

Elsewhere, Cloudflare has also now joined CrowdStrike’s recently launched CrowdXDR Alliance, which is a coalition of security and IT personnel from across the SaaS, cloud, and cybersecurity spheres. Launch partners include Google, Okta, and ServiceNow, and with Cloudlfare now on board, joint customers will have access to integrated threat intelligence to identify and mitigate threats.

“Every business needs to protect users and teams wherever they are or how they work,” Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming said in a statement. “Now we’re making it easier for joint Cloudflare and CrowdStrike customers to benefit from new integrated security features for the ‘connect from anywhere’ economy.”