Go Beyond the Perimeter: Frictionless Zero Trust With CrowdStrike and Zscaler

With today’s workforce moving outside of the physical office, modern security architectures have moved away from the “hard exterior, soft interior” model where there is a well-defined perimeter that is fortified and everything inside is implicitly trusted. The increased adoption of cloud, mobile and modern computer infrastructure, along with today’s distributed workforce, means that the perimeter has dissolved, leading to an ever-expanding attack surface. 

With the evolution of the workforce, there has been a shift in the cybersecurity mindset toward a Zero Trust framework. This framework is focused on an identity-centric and data-centric approach that focuses on data, people, devices, workloads and networks. 

Research shows that over 75% of enterprises report struggling to shift to a Zero Trust approach due to the complexities of user access needs. In this blog, we explain how organizations are successfully implementing Zero Trust without that complexity, cost and user friction for IT, security and the workforce end user, leading to reduced risk and cost.

For an organization to successfully adopt and implement Zero Trust architecture, one of the key requirements is constantly authenticating, authorizing and continuously validating the identity and security posture of each access request from every endpoint. To minimize unauthorized access to data, applications and compute resources over networks, “never trust, always verify” must extend to user endpoints. 

How Falcon Zero Trust Solves This Problem

Endpoint security is one of the foundational building blocks of Zero Trust. To fit into the Zero Trust framework, endpoint security controls must be dynamic and provide real-time visibility into the risk to users and data. In order to provide a holistic cybersecurity approach, these controls must not stop at user authentication, but must expand to include device security posture.

CrowdStrike Falcon® ZTA (Zero Trust Assessment) supports Falcon Zero Trust by providing continuous, real-time security and compliance checks for endpoints, making sure that authentication and authorization is granted only to devices with strong security postures. This enables the protection of sensitive data while granting access across users, on any network and any location — without the use of VPNs (virtual private networks). With the power of CrowdStrike Security Cloud and single lightweight intelligent Falcon agent, organizations can have a frictionless journey to Zero Trust with no additional complexity. With the power of the CrowdStrike Security Cloud and single lightweight intelligent CrowdStrike Falcon® agent, organizations can have a frictionless journey to Zero Trust with little or no additional complexity.

Zero Trust with CrowdStrike and Zscaler 

Together CrowdStrike and Zscaler have been simplifying the adoption of Zero Trust for IT teams. The joint innovation between Zscaler and CrowdStrike provides an end-to-end security solution, from endpoint to application. These integrations ensure administrators have a real-time view of a device’s security posture, and access to critical applications is based on granular access policies. By sharing data between the CrowdStrike Falcon® sensor at the endpoint and Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange, access can automatically adapt based on the context of the user, device health or updated access policies from Zscaler.

The CrowdStrike integration with Zscaler shares threat intelligence and enables automatic workflows to help organizations reduce the number of security incidents — and, in case an incident does occur, delivers quick time-to-detection and remediation. 

Moreover, the integration provides the ability to monitor device health and compliance via ZTA scores, and quickly remediate gaps with Zero Trust access policy control and inline blocking based on CrowdStrike-detected indicators of compromise (IOCs). Together, Zscaler and CrowdStrike enable access to applications and the internet with maximally adaptive access control, without hindering user productivity. 

This bidirectional sharing of threat intelligence, increased visibility and automatic workflow across platforms helps organizations increase the timeliness and effectiveness of threat defense, detection and remediation.

The benefits from the joint solution are not limited to IT security alone. As businesses look to enable work-from-anywhere strategies, this joint solution makes it easier to provide users with safe, seamless and secure access to essential business applications for day-to-day employee activity. All of this can now be achieved on a foundation of Zero Trust.

Join us for a day in the cloud to learn about how we go “beyond the perimeter” — during this event, CrowdStrike CTO Mike Sentonas and Zscaler CTO Amit Sinha will detail new joint innovations and showcase the Enterprise Security Transformation blueprint. The event also features two breakout sessions focusing on business and technical perspectives and how Zero Trust immediately adds value to a business. There’ll also be an inspirational keynote from Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi, astrophysicist and former Space Science Education lead for NASA — he’ll cover his personal life journey as documented in his highly anticipated memoir, A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars. Learn more and register for Beyond the Perimeter today!

Additional Resources 

• To learn more about the Zero Trust joint innovation between CrowdStrike and Zscaler, read the press release.
• Attend the CrowdStrike and Zscaler Beyond the Perimeter event: Register here.
• Learn more about CrowdStrike and Zscaler’s threat intelligence integration here.
• Learn more about the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform by visiting the product webpage.
• Test CrowdStrike next-gen AV for yourself. Start your free trial of Falcon Prevent™ today.