CrowdStrike is honored to be named Partner of the Year for several 2023 Geo and Global AWS Partner Awards at Amazon Web Services re:Invent 2023, where we are participating this year as a Diamond Sponsor.

We are also proud to be a launch partner for AWS Built-in and achieve two AWS competencies. These accomplishments demonstrate our forward-thinking approach to cloud security and commitment to ensuring CrowdStrike customers have the strongest possible protection as the cloud threat landscape continues to evolve.

Let’s get into this week’s announcements.

CrowdStrike Wins Multiple AWS Partner Awards

CrowdStrike was recognized during AWS re:Invent as a global leader with a key role in helping customers drive innovation and build solutions on AWS. This year, CrowdStrike was selected as the winner of the following AWS Partner Awards:

• Public Sector Partner of the Year: Recognizes CrowdStrike as the top AWS Public Sector Partner with cloud-based solutions and experience supporting government, space, education and nonprofit organizations around the world.
• State or Local Government Partner of the Year: Recognizes CrowdStrike as the top AWS Partner with the Government Competency, delivering innovative mission-based wins for state and/or local governments.
• Non-Profit Organization Partner of the Year: Recognizes CrowdStrike as the top AWS Partner that has delivered innovative mission-based wins for non-profits.

CrowdStrike: An AWS Built-in Launch Partner with Built-In Competency

Businesses are constantly seeking ways to fortify their cloud environments to defend against adversaries increasingly targeting the cloud. They must select the right technologies to protect their cloud-based systems and workloads and deploy these solutions in a seamless, efficient and scalable manner. 

During AWS re:invent 2023, AWS officially launched its AWS Built-in Competency partner program. The goal of this initiative is to accelerate customer success by promoting AWS Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partners delivering cloud security and operational services that integrate closely with AWS native services. 

CrowdStrike achieved the AWS Built-in Competency in the security category by automating cloud security deployment and leveraging the event-driven architecture of cloud services. For example, when new workloads are provisioned — such as the launch of new Amazon EC2 instances or creation of new AWS accounts — that event can be used to trigger specific security actions. These may include automatically deploying the CrowdStrike Falcon® sensor on Amazon EC2 for CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security runtime protection, or registering new accounts for Falcon Cloud Security agentless posture scanning and behavioral analysis.

Falcon Cloud Security provides complete visibility into cloud assets and uncovers risks related to misconfigurations, software package vulnerabilities, hard-coded secrets, malware, insecure identities and more. Combining agent-based and agentless detection in a unified platform empowers Falcon Cloud Security to proactively identify, prioritize and remove critical issues in cloud environments.

The integration between Falcon Cloud Security and AWS Built-In will: 

• Automate security deployment: Falcon Cloud Security combines several key capabilities that work together to deliver unified cloud security. These include:
• Cloud security posture management (CSPM): Falcon Cloud Security scans AWS services to uncover misconfigurations that adversaries could use to start or extend an attack, while ingesting AWS service API telemetry to hunt for anomalous activity that may indicate an attack. 
• Cloud workload protection (CWP): Agent-based CWP provides deep insight and AI-driven adaptive protection for workloads including Amazon EC2 instances and containerized applications.
• Pre-runtime protection: Pre-runtime container image scanning and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) scanning identify vulnerable packages and high-risk configurations before they are implemented in production. 

Individually, each of these components could require a different deployment mechanism that may delay time-to-value, especially when protecting multiple accounts across multiple regions. CrowdStrike’s built-in solution combines these capabilities in a simple and configurable CloudFormation template. It works with AWS Control Tower to establish a secure multi-account landing zone and can independently and automatically deploy individual components in response to events in the environment, such as the creation of new Amazon EC2 instances or deployment of new accounts in an AWS Control Tower or AWS Organizations landing zone. 

Accelerate the customer’s time-to-value: The need for effective, reliable and quick integration of security tools is paramount. By streamlining the integration process, CrowdStrike empowers customers to fully harness the benefits of foundational AWS-native services while achieving complete cloud security. Our objective is to deliver a unified customer experience by eliminating the complexities of combining disparate software and data sources.

Enhance reliability and efficiency: As businesses look to migrate and expand their operations on AWS, they need a security solution that can deploy at the speed of cloud. With AWS Built-in, customers can seamlessly deploy Falcon Cloud Security and consolidate disjointed point products with the most unified cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP), built on a combined agent-based and agentless approach for complete visibility and protection.

CrowdStrike Achieves AWS Container Competency

The AWS Container Competency recognizes ISV partners offering software designed to operate seamlessly and cost-effectively in container environments. Container clusters such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) may host hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of ephemeral containers in a single cluster. They rely on IaC to define automated actions that occur throughout the container and cluster lifecycle. 

Our achievement of the AWS Container Competency marks a significant milestone in our partnership with AWS. This underscores our deep and proven expertise in managing container-based applications, a critical aspect of modern cloud environments. By attaining this competency, CrowdStrike not only demonstrates its commitment to providing robust security solutions for containerized applications but also aligns closely with AWS’ high standards for performance and security.

Falcon Cloud Security’s container environment protection uses Kubernetes-native packaging and deployment features such as Operators and Helm charts to provision cluster resources such as access roles, configuration files and self-healing pod replicas. The Kubernetes Admission Controller feature discovers new cluster objects as they’re created, inspects them for risks and vulnerabilities, and enables the creation of granular policies to block, alert or log specific cluster operations. Falcon Cloud Security is designed to protect a wide range of container environments including CSP-managed and self-managed Kubernetes, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA) and individual Docker hosts.

CrowdStrike’s dual achievement of the AWS Built-in Competency and Container Competency is a clear testament to our forward-thinking approach in cloud security. By aligning with AWS’s high standards, we’re both reinforcing our commitment to providing advanced security solutions and ensuring these solutions are seamlessly integrated with AWS’ leading cloud services. This synergy is pivotal in today’s landscape, where the sophistication of cyber threats targeting cloud environments continues to evolve. 

Curious about Falcon Cloud Security? Explore our free, no-obligation Cloud Security Risk Review for instant and complete visibility into your entire cloud estate, provided through agentless scanning. It deploys in minutes with zero impact to your business.

Additional Resources

• Learn more about the world’s leading AI-native platform for complete cloud security.
• Learn more about how CrowdStrike protects AWS workloads: Falcon for AWS webpage.
• Learn how the powerful CrowdStrike Falcon® platform provides comprehensive protection across your organization, workers and data, wherever they are located.
• See for yourself how the industry-leading CrowdStrike Falcon platform protects against modern threats. Start your 15-day free trial today.