(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to be joined by Jessica Alexander, who is the VP of Cloud Solutions Sales and Alliances at CrowdStrike. Jessica, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. >> So we're going to unpack a lot today, some news, what's going on with the threat landscape, what you're seeing across industries, but I want to get started talking a little bit about your team. As I mentioned, VP of Cloud Solutions Sales and Alliances. Talk to me about your team because you have a unique GTM here that I'd like to get into. >> Sure. Thank you, Lisa. Well, we recently launched our new cloud security products, Cloud Workload Protection and Horizon earlier this year. So we wanted to make sure that we accelerated our entry into this new product market, this new addressable market, and so we established not only a cloud sales specialist team that helps our core sellers as well as our partners sell our new cloud security products but we also wanted to make sure it was tightly integrated and aligned with our Cloud Alliances so specifically our co-sell relationship and partnership that we have with AWS. >> Got it. Let's talk about some of the things you mentioned, Aksino acceleration entering into the market. We saw a lot of acceleration in the last 20 months and counting, especially with respect to cloud adoption, digital transformation, but also the threat landscape things have accelerated. Wanted to get some information from you on what you've seen. We've seen and talked to a lot of folks on ransomware stats, you know, it's up nearly 11x in the first half of '21, but you guys have some unique stats and insights on that. Talk to me about what CrowdStrike is seeing with respect to that threat landscape and who it's impacting. >> Sure. You know, we have a unique perspective. CrowdStrike has millions of sensors out in our customer environments, they're feeding trillions of events into the cloud and we're able to correlate this data in real time, so this gives us a very unique perspective into what's happening in adversary activity out in the world. We also get feeds from our incident response teams that are actively responding to issues, as well as our Intel operatives out in the world. So, you know, we correlate these three sources of data into our threat graph in the cloud powered by AWS, which gives us very good insights into activity that we're seeing from an adversary perspective. So we also have a group called the OverWatch team, they are 24 by seven, you know, humans monitoring our cloud and monitoring our customer's networks to detect or, you know, get pre-breach activity information. And what they're seeing is that, you know, over this last year, an adversary is able to enter a network and move laterally into that network within one hour and 32 minutes. Now, you know, this is really fast, especially when you consider that in 2020, that average was four hours and 37 minutes for a threat actor to move laterally, you know, infiltrate a network and then move laterally. So, you know, the themes that we're seeing are adversaries are getting a lot faster and a lot more efficient, and, you know, as more companies are moving to remote work environments, you know, setting up virtual infrastructure for employees to use for work and productivity, you know, that threat landscape becomes more critical. >> Right? It becomes more critical. It becomes bigger. And of course we are in this work from anywhere environment that's going to last or some amount of it will persist permanently. So what you're saying is you're seeing a 4x increase in the speed with which adversaries can get in and laterally move within a network, so dramatically faster in a year over year period, where, so there's been so much flux in every market and of course in our lives, what are some of the things that you're helping customers do to combat this growing challenge? >> Well, it really goes back to being predictive and having that real time snapshot of what's going on and being able to proactively reach out to customers before anything bad happens and, you know, we're also seeing that ransomware continues to be an issue for customers, so, you know, having the ability to prevent these attacks and ransomware from happening in the first place and really taking the advantage that an adversary may have from a speed or intelligence perspective, taking that advantage away by having the Falcon Platform actively monitoring our customer environments is a big advantage. >> So let's talk about, speaking of advantages, what are you guys announcing at re:Invent this year? >> Sure. Well, we have two new service integrations with Amazon EKS, AWS Outpost and AWS Firelands to talk about this year. The cool thing is that, you know, customers are going to get our wonderful breach protection that we have, you know, the gold standard of breach protection, they'll have that available on various cloud services. And what it does is it provides consistent security and simplified operational management across AWS services, as customers extend those from public cloud to the data center, to the edge. And you know, the other great benefit is that it accelerates threat hunting, so we were talking about, you know, being able to predict and see what adversaries are doing. You know, one of the great customer benefits is that they can do that with their own teams and be able to do that on a cloud infrastructure as well. >> And how much of the events of the last 20 months was a catalyst or were catalysts for these integrations that you just mentioned? I imagine the threat landscape growing ransomware becoming a 'when we get hit not if' would have been some of those catalysts. >> Well, you know, we're seeing that the adoption of cloud services, especially for end user computing is growing much faster than traditional on-prem desktops, laptops, as people continue to work remotely and customers need to be, or corporations need to be efficient at how they manage end user computing environments. So, you know, we are seeing that adversary activity is picking up, they're getting smarter about, you know, leveraging cloud services and potential misconfigurations, there're really four key areas that we see customers struggle with, whether it be, you know, the complexity of cloud services, whether it be shadow IT, and a lot of the security folks don't necessarily know where all the cloud services are being deployed, then you've got, you know, kind of the advanced techniques that adversaries are using to get into networks. And then, you know, last but certainly not least is skills shortage. We're finding that a lot of customers want a turnkey solution, where they don't have to have a team of cloud security specialists to respond or handle any misconfigurations or issues that come up. They want to have a turnkey solution, a team that's already watching and reaching out to them to say, "Hey, you may want to look into XYZ and update a policy, or, you know, activate this new, you know, this feature in the platform." >> Yeah. That real time, the ability to have something that's turnkey is critical in this day and age where things are moving so quickly, there's so much being accelerated, good stuff and bad stuff. But also you mentioned that cybersecurity skills gap, which is in its, I think it's in its fifth year now, which is a big challenge for organizations as this scattered, work from anywhere persists as does the growth of the threat landscape. Let's get into now, for, you mentioned the adoption of cloud services has gone up considerably in this interesting time period, how is CrowdStrike helping customers do that securely, migrate from on-prem to the cloud with that security and that confidence that their landscape is protected? >> Yeah, well, we find obviously in the shared responsibility model, the great thing is that, you know, CrowdStrike and AWS team up to help, you know, customers have a better together experience as they migrate to the cloud. AWS is obviously responsible for the security of the cloud and customers are responsible for the security in the cloud. And in speaking with our customers who are moving or have moved to cloud services, and they really want a trusted and simple platform to use when securing their data and applications. So what, you know, they also have hybrid environments that can get complex to support, and, you know, we want to be able to provide them with a unified platform, a unified experience, regardless of where the workload is running or what services that it's using. You know, they have that unified visibility and protection across all of the cloud workloads. We're also, you know, seeing that, especially the reason we're doing this great integration with Outpost and EKS Anywhere is that customers are, you know, taking their cloud services out to their data centers as well as to the edge locations and branch offices, so they want to be able to run EKS on their own infrastructure. So it's important that customers have that portability that regardless of whether it's a laptop or an EC2 instance or an EKS container, you know, they have that portability throughout the continuum of their cloud journey. >> That continuum is absolutely critical as we, you know, talk about cloud and application or continuum from the customer's perspective, the cloud continuum is something that is front and center for customers, I imagine in every industry. >> Oh, for sure, 'cause every industry is adopting cloud maybe at a different speed, maybe for different applications, but, you know, everybody's moving to the cloud. >> So talk to me about what you're announcing with AWS, let's get into a little bit about the partnership that CloudStrike and AWS have, let's unpack that a bit. >> Sure. You know, we've been an AWS advanced technology partner for over five years. We've had our products, we now have six of our CrowdStrike products listed on AWS Marketplace. We're an active co-sell partner and, you know, have our security competency and our well-architected certification. And really it's about building trust with our customers. You know, AWS has a lot of wonderful partner products for customers to use and it's really about building trust that, you know, we're validated, we're vetted, we have a lot of customers who are using our products with AWS, and, you know, I think it's that tight collaboration, for example, if you look at what we're doing with Humio, we've implemented a quick start program, which AWS has to get customers quickly deployed with an integration or a new capability with a partner product. And what this does is it spins up a quick cloud formation template, customer can integrate it very quickly with the AWS Firelands and then, you know, all that log information coming from the AWS containers is easily ingested into the Humio platform. And so, you know, it really reduces the time to get the integration up and running as well as pulling all that data into the Humio platform so that customers can, like we said earlier, go back and threat hunt across, you know, different cloud service components in a quick and easy way. >> Quick and easy is good as is faster time to value. You mentioned the word trust, and, you know, we talk about trust, we've been talking about it for years as it relates to technology, but I'm curious, Jessica, in the last year and a half, if your customer conversations have changed, is trust now even more important than ever as there are so many things in flux, have you noticed any sort of change there in your customer conversations? >> Well, you know, I think trust is extensible. And over the last 10 years, CrowdStrike's done a really great job of building customer trust. And, you know, we started out as, you know, kind of primarily EDR and we've moved into prevention and now we're moving into identity protection and XDR so, you know, I see a pattern that, you know, we've built this amazing core of trust across our existing customers, and as we offer more capabilities, whether it be, you know, cloud security or XDR, identity protection, you know, customers trust us and so they're very willing to say, "ah well, I want to try out these new capabilities that CrowdStrike has because we trust you guys, you know, you've done a lot to protect our brand and, you know, really make our internal teams a lot more efficient and a lot smarter." So, you know, I think while trust is important, it's also something that we get to carry forward as we enter new markets and continue to innovate and provide new capabilities for our customers. >> And really extending that trusted, valued partner relationship that you've already established with customers in every industry. So where can customers go? So the joint GTM customers, and you said products available in the AWS marketplace, but where do you recommend customers go to learn more about how they can work with these joint solutions that CrowdStrike and AWS have together? >> Absolutely. We have a landing page on AWS, if you Google AWS and CrowdStrike, whether it be marketplace or EKS Anywhere, Amazon outposts, we're on all the joint product pages with Amazon, as well as always going to crowdstrike.com and looking up our cloud security products. >> Got it. And last question for you, Jessica, summarize the announcement in terms of business outcomes that it's going to enable your joint customers to achieve. >> Absolutely. You know, I think it goes back to probably the primary reason is complexity. And, you know, with complexity comes risk and blind spots so being able to have a unified platform that no matter where the workload is, or the employee may be, they are protected and have, you know, a unified platform and experience to manage their security risk. >> Excellent. Jessica, thank you so much for coming on the program today, sharing with me, what's new with CrowdStrike, some of the things that you're seeing, and what you're helping customers to accomplish in a very dynamic environment, we appreciate your time and your insights. >> Thank you for having me, Lisa. >> For Jessica Alexander, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to be joined by Jessica Alexander, who is the VP of Cloud Solutions Sales and Alliances at CrowdStrike. Jessica, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. >> So we're going to unpack a lot today, some news, what's going on with the threat landscape, what you're seeing across industries, but I want to get started talking a little bit about your team. As I mentioned, VP of Cloud Solutions Sales and Alliances. Talk to me about your team because you have a unique GTM here that I'd like to get into. >> Sure. Thank you, Lisa. Well, we recently launched our new cloud security products, Cloud Workload Protection and Horizon earlier this year. So we wanted to make sure that we accelerated our entry into this new product market, this new addressable market, and so we established not only a cloud sales specialist team that helps our core sellers as well as our partners sell our new cloud security products but we also wanted to make sure it was tightly integrated and aligned with our Cloud Alliances so specifically our co-sell relationship and partnership that we have with AWS. >> Got it. Let's talk about some of the things you mentioned, Aksino acceleration entering into the market. We saw a lot of acceleration in the last 20 months and counting, especially with respect to cloud adoption, digital transformation, but also the threat landscape things have accelerated. Wanted to get some information from you on what you've seen. We've seen and talked to a lot of folks on ransomware stats, you know, it's up nearly 11x in the first half of '21, but you guys have some unique stats and insights on that. Talk to me about what CrowdStrike is seeing with respect to that threat landscape and who it's impacting. >> Sure. You know, we have a unique perspective. CrowdStrike has millions of sensors out in our customer environments, they're feeding trillions of events into the cloud and we're able to correlate this data in real time, so this gives us a very unique perspective into what's happening in adversary activity out in the world. We also get feeds from our incident response teams that are actively responding to issues, as well as our Intel operatives out in the world. So, you know, we correlate these three sources of data into our threat graph in the cloud powered by AWS, which gives us very good insights into activity that we're seeing from an adversary perspective. So we also have a group called the OverWatch team, they are 24 by seven, you know, humans monitoring our cloud and monitoring our customer's networks to detect or, you know, get pre-breach activity information. And what they're seeing is that, you know, over this last year, an adversary is able to enter a network and move laterally into that network within one hour and 32 minutes. Now, you know, this is really fast, especially when you consider that in 2020, that average was four hours and 37 minutes for a threat actor to move laterally, you know, infiltrate a network and then move laterally. So, you know, the themes that we're seeing are adversaries are getting a lot faster and a lot more efficient, and, you know, as more companies are moving to remote work environments, you know, setting up virtual infrastructure for employees to use for work and productivity, you know, that threat landscape becomes more critical. >> Right? It becomes more critical. It becomes bigger. And of course we are in this work from anywhere environment that's going to last or some amount of it will persist permanently. So what you're saying is you're seeing a 4x increase in the speed with which adversaries can get in and laterally move within a network, so dramatically faster in a year over year period, where, so there's been so much flux in every market and of course in our lives, what are some of the things that you're helping customers do to combat this growing challenge? >> Well, it really goes back to being predictive and having that real time snapshot of what's going on and being able to proactively reach out to customers before anything bad happens and, you know, we're also seeing that ransomware continues to be an issue for customers, so, you know, having the ability to prevent these attacks and ransomware from happening in the first place and really taking the advantage that an adversary may have from a speed or intelligence perspective, taking that advantage away by having the Falcon Platform actively monitoring our customer environments is a big advantage. >> So let's talk about, speaking of advantages, what are you guys announcing at re:Invent this year? >> Sure. Well, we have two new service integrations with Amazon EKS, AWS Outpost and AWS Firelands to talk about this year. The cool thing is that, you know, customers are going to get our wonderful breach protection that we have, you know, the gold standard of breach protection, they'll have that available on various cloud services. And what it does is it provides consistent security and simplified operational management across AWS services, as customers extend those from public cloud to the data center, to the edge. And you know, the other great benefit is that it accelerates threat hunting, so we were talking about, you know, being able to predict and see what adversaries are doing. You know, one of the great customer benefits is that they can do that with their own teams and be able to do that on a cloud infrastructure as well. >> And how much of the events of the last 20 months was a catalyst or were catalysts for these integrations that you just mentioned? I imagine the threat landscape growing ransomware becoming a 'when we get hit not if' would have been some of those catalysts. >> Well, you know, we're seeing that the adoption of cloud services, especially for end user computing is growing much faster than traditional on-prem desktops, laptops, as people continue to work remotely and customers need to be, or corporations need to be efficient at how they manage end user computing environments. So, you know, we are seeing that adversary activity is picking up, they're getting smarter about, you know, leveraging cloud services and potential misconfigurations, there're really four key areas that we see customers struggle with, whether it be, you know, the complexity of cloud services, whether it be shadow IT, and a lot of the security folks don't necessarily know where all the cloud services are being deployed, then you've got, you know, kind of the advanced techniques that adversaries are using to get into networks. And then, you know, last but certainly not least is skills shortage. We're finding that a lot of customers want a turnkey solution, where they don't have to have a team of cloud security specialists to respond or handle any misconfigurations or issues that come up. They want to have a turnkey solution, a team that's already watching and reaching out to them to say, "Hey, you may want to look into XYZ and update a policy, or, you know, activate this new, you know, this feature in the platform." >> Yeah. That real time, the ability to have something that's turnkey is critical in this day and age where things are moving so quickly, there's so much being accelerated, good stuff and bad stuff. But also you mentioned that cybersecurity skills gap, which is in its, I think it's in its fifth year now, which is a big challenge for organizations as this scattered, work from anywhere persists as does the growth of the threat landscape. Let's get into now, for, you mentioned the adoption of cloud services has gone up considerably in this interesting time period, how is CrowdStrike helping customers do that securely, migrate from on-prem to the cloud with that security and that confidence that their landscape is protected? >> Yeah, well, we find obviously in the shared responsibility model, the great thing is that, you know, CrowdStrike and AWS team up to help, you know, customers have a better together experience as they migrate to the cloud. AWS is obviously responsible for the security of the cloud and customers are responsible for the security in the cloud. And in speaking with our customers who are moving or have moved to cloud services, and they really want a trusted and simple platform to use when securing their data and applications. So what, you know, they also have hybrid environments that can get complex to support, and, you know, we want to be able to provide them with a unified platform, a unified experience, regardless of where the workload is running or what services that it's using. You know, they have that unified visibility and protection across all of the cloud workloads. We're also, you know, seeing that, especially the reason we're doing this great integration with Outpost and EKS Anywhere is that customers are, you know, taking their cloud services out to their data centers as well as to the edge locations and branch offices, so they want to be able to run EKS on their own infrastructure. So it's important that customers have that portability that regardless of whether it's a laptop or an EC2 instance or an EKS container, you know, they have that portability throughout the continuum of their cloud journey. >> That continuum is absolutely critical as we, you know, talk about cloud and application or continuum from the customer's perspective, the cloud continuum is something that is front and center for customers, I imagine in every industry. >> Oh, for sure, 'cause every industry is adopting cloud maybe at a different speed, maybe for different applications, but, you know, everybody's moving to the cloud. >> So talk to me about what you're announcing with AWS, let's get into a little bit about the partnership that CloudStrike and AWS have, let's unpack that a bit. >> Sure. You know, we've been an AWS advanced technology partner for over five years. We've had our products, we now have six of our CrowdStrike products listed on AWS Marketplace. We're an active co-sell partner and, you know, have our security competency and our well-architected certification. And really it's about building trust with our customers. You know, AWS has a lot of wonderful partner products for customers to use and it's really about building trust that, you know, we're validated, we're vetted, we have a lot of customers who are using our products with AWS, and, you know, I think it's that tight collaboration, for example, if you look at what we're doing with Humio, we've implemented a quick start program, which AWS has to get customers quickly deployed with an integration or a new capability with a partner product. And what this does is it spins up a quick cloud formation template, customer can integrate it very quickly with the AWS Firelands and then, you know, all that log information coming from the AWS containers is easily ingested into the Humio platform. And so, you know, it really reduces the time to get the integration up and running as well as pulling all that data into the Humio platform so that customers can, like we said earlier, go back and threat hunt across, you know, different cloud service components in a quick and easy way. >> Quick and easy is good as is faster time to value. You mentioned the word trust, and, you know, we talk about trust, we've been talking about it for years as it relates to technology, but I'm curious, Jessica, in the last year and a half, if your customer conversations have changed, is trust now even more important than ever as there are so many things in flux, have you noticed any sort of change there in your customer conversations? >> Well, you know, I think trust is extensible. And over the last 10 years, CrowdStrike's done a really great job of building customer trust. And, you know, we started out as, you know, kind of primarily EDR and we've moved into prevention and now we're moving into identity protection and XDR so, you know, I see a pattern that, you know, we've built this amazing core of trust across our existing customers, and as we offer more capabilities, whether it be, you know, cloud security or XDR, identity protection, you know, customers trust us and so they're very willing to say, "ah well, I want to try out these new capabilities that CrowdStrike has because we trust you guys, you know, you've done a lot to protect our brand and, you know, really make our internal teams a lot more efficient and a lot smarter." So, you know, I think while trust is important, it's also something that we get to carry forward as we enter new markets and continue to innovate and provide new capabilities for our customers. >> And really extending that trusted, valued partner relationship that you've already established with customers in every industry. So where can customers go? So the joint GTM customers, and you said products available in the AWS marketplace, but where do you recommend customers go to learn more about how they can work with these joint solutions that CrowdStrike and AWS have together? >> Absolutely. We have a landing page on AWS, if you Google AWS and CrowdStrike, whether it be marketplace or EKS Anywhere, Amazon outposts, we're on all the joint product pages with Amazon, as well as always going to crowdstrike.com and looking up our cloud security products. >> Got it. And last question for you, Jessica, summarize the announcement in terms of business outcomes that it's going to enable your joint customers to achieve. >> Absolutely. You know, I think it goes back to probably the primary reason is complexity. And, you know, with complexity comes risk and blind spots so being able to have a unified platform that no matter where the workload is, or the employee may be, they are protected and have, you know, a unified platform and experience to manage their security risk. >> Excellent. Jessica, thank you so much for coming on the program today, sharing with me, what's new with CrowdStrike, some of the things that you're seeing, and what you're helping customers to accomplish in a very dynamic environment, we appreciate your time and your insights. >> Thank you for having me, Lisa. >> For Jessica Alexander, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. (gentle music)