Zscaler and Crowdstrike deepen integration on edge security
Two of the more well-known cybersecurity companies in the market have added integrations for joint customers. Zscaler’s roots are in cloud and networks while Crowdstrike’s are in endpoint detection; together they claim they can provide Zero Trust security across networks, devices and applications.
Zscaler is a Secure Access Service Edge provider, a secure cloud gateway offering private internet with SD-WAN capabilities. Its services are delivered on a Zero Trust basis, which requires users to provide credentials at every connection. Zscaler argues its platform is more flexible and cheaper than a corporate VPN, and it has certainly enjoyed a meteoric rise over the last year. Crowdstrike operates an endpoint protection platform, also on a Zero Trust basis, via lightweight agents on end-users laptops and other devices. It’s also had a strong year in the pandemic, with its stock price tripling.
How will the integration work in practice? Crowdstrike assigns scores in real time to end-users based on intelligence gathered from the 5 trillion events it processes every week. This score is passed to Zscaler and used to grant or deny permission to end users looking to gain access to networks or applications.
Analyst Take
Zscaler and CrowdStrike have been partners since 2019 but Zscaler is now set is to become CrowdStrike’s first cloud security partner. The integration approach to creating a Zero Trust network access (ZTNA) services is not uncommon, but a number of competitors have been acquiring startups to build out the network access control portion of the portfolio, including Fortinet (Opaq Networks, 2020) and CheckPoint (OdoAccess, 2020). The integration approach leaves more flexibility for customers who want to keep existing SD-WAN and firewall vendors in the mix, but in the long run, a unified, single-vendor approach might be more appealing overall as enterprises seek to reduce vendor management complexity.
Article Topics
CrowdStrike | endpoint security | network access | VPN | Zero Trust | Zscaler
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