Cloudflare and CrowdStrike partner to accelerate shift 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 that detailed various measures to improve the nation’s cybersecurity — one of those was that all Federal Agencies should adopt a zero trust architecture. The Order itself came in response to a growing number of malicious cyber campaigns that threatened both the public and private sectors, including the much-publicized SolarWinds supply chain attacks.

The “zero trust” concept is built around the idea that traditional security practices were built on the assumption that everything within an organization’s own perimeter was safe, therefore it could be “trusted.” But that obviously isn’t the case, as bad actors — both external and internal — can wreak havoc if they have access to a company’s network. Zero trust does exactly as it says on the box — there is no implicit trust, and every interaction from every endpoint has to be validated through robust authentication mechanisms.

Zero trust transition

A Cloudflare-commissioned Forrester report from 2020 indicated that while more than three-quarters of businesses wanted to hasten their transition to a zero trust security architecture, technical challenges precluded them from doing so — this included complexities around identity and access management (IAM). And this is where Cloudflare and CrowdStrike enter the fray.

The duo, which collectively specialize in web infrastructure and cybersecurity, are introducing an array of integrations to ensure only the right people can gain access to critical applications and systems. Cloudflare’s Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) and Secure Web Gateway (SWG), for example, are now integrated with CrowdStrike’s Falcon Zero Trust Assessment (ZTA), which enables conditional access to applications from any endpoint, irrespective 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 included Google, Okta, and ServiceNow, and with Cloudlfare now on board, joint customers will gain access to combined threat intelligence to identify and mitigate threats.

“Every business needs to protect users and teams no matter where they are or how they’re working,” Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming said in a statement. “Now we’re making it even easier for joint customers of Cloudflare and CrowdStrike to benefit from new combined security features for the ‘connect-from-anywhere’ economy.”

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz