CrowdStrike & Google Cloud: AI-driven cloud security – News

With cloud adoption in full swing, enterprises face a pressing challenge: ensuring cloud security at scale without operational slowdowns.

CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. and Google LLC are tackling this challenge together, combining their strengths to deliver artificial intelligence-powered security at scale, according to Cristian Rodriguez (pictured, left), field chief technology officer, Americas, at CrowdStrike.

“This partnership is all about delivering better outcomes, faster innovation, stopping breaches before they happen,” Rodriguez said. “That’s a big theme that we’ve had since our inception. We want our businesses to confidently build and operate in the cloud, and this partnership with Google Cloud really underscores how we can innovate within an environment that needs to be fast, scalable and effective.”

Rodriguez and Stephen Orban (right), vice president of migrations, ISVs and marketplace at Google Cloud, spoke with theCUBE Research’s John Furrier for the Google Cloud Marketplace Marvels interview series, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, News Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how their partnership enhances cloud security, streamlines procurement and delivers AI-driven protection for enterprise workloads. (* Disclosure below.)

AI-powered threat defense: CrowdStrike’s proactive approach

CrowdStrike has built a reputation as a leader in modern security, pioneering a cloud-native approach that safeguards enterprise assets across cloud environments, endpoints, identities and data. At the core of its offering is real-time AI-driven threat intelligence, which enables enterprises to detect, prevent and respond to attacks before they escalate, according to Rodriguez.

“We built this and pioneered this cloud-native security platform,” Rodriguez said. “Then, we back that up with world-class threat intelligence that’s led by a team of elite threat hunters and expertise that focuses on what the adversary is doing so that we can also give our customers access to proactive threat hunting, and we’ve built a lot of AI around that.”

Security must be built in for enterprises moving to the cloud from the start. Google Cloud’s Marketplace simplifies access to trusted cloud security solutions, ensuring robust protection while reducing deployment friction, according to Orban.

“Security is job zero,” he said. “Workloads won’t move in a material way to the cloud unless there is a very clear way to secure those. Customers expect us to have world-leading, world-class software partnerships where we can deliver everything that they need.”

Google Cloud’s advantage in cloud security: Simplifying protection at scale

A key component of this partnership is its ability to provide built-in security through deep integrations. Organizations deploying workloads on Google Cloud benefit from CrowdStrike’s embedded protections across services such as Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Run for serverless applications, and BigQuery for security analytics, according to Rodriguez.

“Customers want and have been asking for this kind of full-stack protection,” he said. “That includes understanding what services are running across those native capabilities of Google Cloud … visibility into workloads and containers … and the ability to protect them without any additional complexity or additional resources.”

Google Cloud Marketplace plays a critical role in making these integrations accessible. By streamlining procurement and consolidating security solutions into a single platform, enterprises can accelerate adoption and respond to threats with greater agility, according to Orban.

“Some of these workloads that our customers are running are tens, hundreds of thousands of instances or containers, or petabytes of data in their BigQuery instances, and they’re doing these just massively scalable workloads,” Orban said. “CrowdStrike can meet them where they are, and it just works.”

Real-world protection: Securing high-stakes industries

Industries with high financial and operational stakes especially benefit from the CrowdStrike and Google Cloud partnership. A major international retailer leveraged CrowdStrike’s Falcon Cloud Security to enhance its cloud security, protecting Google Cloud instances while maintaining seamless performance during peak shopping periods, according to Rodriguez.

“They could not afford to slow down a very fast-paced operation on the retail side,” he said. “By working with CrowdStrike and Google, they were able to test, validate and deploy Falcon Cloud Security across their Google Cloud instances very quickly, ensuring that that protection they had was scaling.”

A large U.S. financial institution also turned to CrowdStrike and Google Cloud to secure its extensive cloud workloads while simplifying procurement through Google Cloud Marketplace. By embedding cloud security at the foundation, the company reduced deployment times and focused on operational efficiency, according to Rodriguez.

“Red tape is red tape,” he said. “Think about changing a procurement framework, where we have real tangible advantages behind leveraging the marketplace to simply get the product into their environment as quickly as possible. Then, naturally, using the integrations … deploying the technology in a really easy way that scales, ensuring that we’re integrated into their entire DevOps cycle from start to finish. That … speaks to removing friction with a capability that’s focused on security that I don’t think we’ve seen before.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of News’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the Google Cloud Marketplace Marvels interview series:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Google Cloud Marketplace Marvels special interview series. Neither Google LLC, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or News.)

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