CrowdStrike to boost Falcon platform with Adaptive Shield buy

Cybersecurity all-star CrowdStrike is significantly boosting its Falcon platform with the acquisition of SaaS security startup Adaptive Shield.

CrowdStrike president Michael Sentonas said the purchase of Israel-based Adaptive Shield is “essential” for the company’s future in SaaS and artificial intelligence security.

“Our acquisition of Adaptive Shield takes us another step forward in giving our customers the best possible protection against modern cyberattacks with the Falcon platform,” said Sentonas in a blog post today.

CrowdStrike’s Falcon software platform integrated with technology from Adaptive Shield—who made CRN’s 2023 Sellar Security Startups list—will deliver “compelling value to organisations by proactively detecting and preventing modern cross-domain attacks spanning endpoint, cloud and SaaS applications,” Sentonas said.

CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform was at the centre of this year’s massive CrowdStrike and Microsoft Windows outage that effected airlines and healthcare services.

“Adaptive Shield is an essential piece of our cloud security vision,” said Sentonas.

“It provides organisations with granular visibility into their growing cloud environments, enables them to manage and secure their SaaS security posture and their human and non-human identities, and helps them detect and prevent identity-centric, cloud-focused cyberattacks.”

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition is expected to close during CrowdStrike’s fiscal fourth quarter 2024.

With the acquisition, CrowdStrike said it will be the only cybersecurity vendor to provide a single platform for end-to-end protection against identity-based attacks across the entire modern cloud ecosystem—from on-premises Active Directory to cloud-based identity providers and SaaS applications.

Who is Adaptive Shield?

Founded in 2019, Adaptive Shield provides customers with comprehensive SaaS security posture management (SSPM).

Its technology provides full visibility into, and governance of, human and non-human identities and their permissions, entitlements, activity levels and public data across more than 150 SaaS applications to strengthen identity security posture.

Beyond identity technology, Adaptive also provides visibility into misconfigurations and other risks affecting SaaS applications so organisations can better manage these issues and detect and respond to threats.

Generative AI security is also core to Adaptive Shield’s capabilities.

SSPM solutions alert users of GenAI SaaS applications to security issues and provide detailed remediation steps so the application owner and security team can collaborate to resolve them.

CrowdStrike’s President said that “within three to four months, organisations implementing Adaptive Shield have reported an improvement from 20 percent visibility to 85 per cent visibility into their SaaS security posture,” representing a “300 percent increase.”

Adaptive Shield and CrowdStrike chief executives weigh in

George Kurtz, chief executive and co-founder of CrowdStrike, said the purchase of Israel-based Adaptive Shield is critical for the company’s future in SaaS and artificial intelligence.

“As SaaS and AI adoption grows, every new application brings additional complexity and the risk of misconfigurations across human and non-human accounts that create openings for sophisticated attacks,” said Kurtz in a statement.

With the acquisition of Adaptive Shield, CrowdStrike will “continue to set the standard for identity-based protection in the cloud, delivering best-in-class SaaS protection from the Falcon platform,” Kurtz said.

Adaptive Shield’s chief executive and co-founder, Maor Bin, said widespread adoption of SaaS applications has rapidly expanded the enterprise attack surface, as shared responsibility models and fragmented security controls make SaaS environments a prime target.

“Our mission perfectly complements CrowdStrike, stopping SaaS breaches while further accelerating consolidation on cybersecurity's most comprehensive platform,” Bin said in a statement.

“I'm incredibly proud of our team for building the most advanced SaaS security solution, defining the market.”

This article originally appeared at crn.com