CrowdStrike Named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Proactive Security Platforms, Q3 2026

CrowdStrike has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Proactive Security Platforms, Q3 2026. We received the highest Strategy category score in the evaluation and maximum scores in both the Innovation and Roadmap criteria.

This evaluation reflects how the market is evolving. Proactive security is moving beyond traditional vulnerability management. While discovering vulnerabilities has become easier, security teams have a harder time understanding the assets and resources each exposure puts at risk, which exposures attackers are likely to use, and how they should prioritize remediation.

Forrester describes this shift in its report: “This market has evolved from ASM [attack surface management] collecting visibility to exposure management modernizing prioritization to action as the next frontier for proactive security platforms.” 

CrowdStrike is leading the industry in this direction with a unified approach that brings visibility, prioritization, validation, and remediation together. CrowdStrike Falcon® Exposure Management combines exposure data with CrowdStrike’s threat intelligence, exploit prediction, and attack path analysis so teams can prioritize and act faster. It’s delivered through the same AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon® platform that organizations use to detect, investigate, and stop threats.

Strategy, Innovation, and Roadmap

CrowdStrike’s Strategy category score was the highest among all providers in the evaluation. Forrester recognized CrowdStrike’s success in delivering new innovations and gave CrowdStrike 5/5 scores in the Innovation and Roadmap criteria. 

Customers that Forrester interviewed offered positive feedback on CrowdStrike® Charlotte AI™ and AgentWorks, the latter of which Forrester says positions CrowdStrike’s roadmap to deliver ahead of customer needs.

With Charlotte AI and AgentWorks, CrowdStrike delivers out-of-the-box AI agents and enables teams to build no-code custom agents to automate the most time-intensive workflows in risk assessment, prioritization, and remediation.

Another feature noted in the report is ExPRT.AI exploit prediction. While CVSS numbers denote a vulnerability’s severity, they don’t indicate the likelihood of an attacker using it. The distinction is key: Adversaries don’t always target vulnerabilities with high severity scores; they choose vulnerabilities that will work for them. 

ExPRT.AI helps teams identify the vulnerabilities more likely to be exploited. This Falcon Exposure Management capability continuously analyzes exploit activity, environmental exposure, and adversary tradecraft to deliver environment-aware risk scores and update those scores as conditions change. 

Additional Falcon Exposure Management innovations include:

• Attack Path Analysis: Shows how an exposure could be used to move through an environment and reach critical assets; it uses CrowdStrike threat intelligence to inform these findings with our knowledge of real-world adversaries and techniques
• Asset runtime enumeration: Prioritizes vulnerabilities only when all necessary conditions, such as running processes, are present for exploitation to occur
• Compensating control awareness: Adjusts risk when exploits are likely to be blocked  

Intermex saw the impact firsthand. After adopting Falcon Exposure Management, the company reduced critical vulnerabilities in its DMZ by 98% by using ExPRT.AI and asset criticality to focus its remediation efforts.

See Falcon Exposure management in action:

Unifying Exposure Management and Security Operations

Today, exposure management and security operations are often separated. Finding an exposure in one tool, investigating it in another, opening a ticket somewhere else, and waiting for another team to fix it creates delay by design.

Falcon Exposure Management changes that operating model by running on the same AI-native Falcon platform businesses already use for detection, investigation, and response. Exposure management teams and SecOps can work from shared telemetry, threat intelligence, and security context rather than passing findings between disconnected systems. This creates a clearer path from exposure discovery to prioritization to remediation. 

AI can reduce even more of the manual work between finding risk and acting on it. Forrester sees AI playing a growing role in proactive security and remediation workflows, while noting that fully autonomous remediation remains a longer-term direction for the market. 

CrowdStrike delivers AI-powered capabilities through Falcon Exposure Management and SecOps on the Falcon platform. Instead of spending hours gathering context and piecing together why an exposure matters, analysts can quickly move from understanding risk to determining the correct response. While human judgment remains central to the process, the key difference is that analysts spend less time assembling the evidence and more time acting on it.

The Future of Proactive Security

Finding and prioritizing exposures is only part of the job. The real goal is to reduce the risk before an attacker can use it.

That means knowing what’s exposed, understanding what is likely to be exploited, and getting the right information to the teams that can fix it. When those steps happen across separate tools and teams, remediation takes longer.

Falcon Exposure Management brings that work together on the Falcon platform. Teams can focus on the exposures that matter most and move faster from finding a problem to fixing it.

That’s what proactive security should deliver: fewer exposures for attackers to use and a faster path to reducing risk.

Learn more by reading the full report: The Forrester Wave™: Proactive Security Platforms, Q3 2026. 

Additional Resources

• Download our guide to explore the five steps for frontier AI security readiness.
• Learn how Falcon Exposure Management can help you discover, prioritize, and manage vulnerability exposure risk in your environment. 
• To learn more about Falcon Exposure Management features, visit our exposure management YouTube channel.

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester resources, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and access to analyst guidance. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here .