How the ALDO Group Gained Complete Visibility and AI-Ready Defense with CrowdStrike

When Richard Lee joined the ALDO Group as Director of Cybersecurity and Privacy, the retail giant’s defenses were basic and fragmented. His small team of four was responsible for protecting hundreds of stores across 110 countries and thousands of employees around the world — all with limited tools and no centralized visibility.

“Unified security wasn’t a want, it was a necessity,” Lee said. “Almost every week a retailer gets breached. We didn’t want to be one of those statistics.”

In just three years, the ALDO Group transformed its cybersecurity posture by consolidating on the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform. What began as a proof of concept for endpoint protection has evolved into a unified defense spanning nearly every attack surface. The result: fewer false positives, faster investigations, prioritized risk management, and visibility into sensitive data and AI workloads — all from a single platform and console.

The ALDO Group’s CrowdStrike journey began with endpoint security. The team quickly realized how far legacy antivirus tools had left them behind. The behavioral, AI-driven approach of CrowdStrike Falcon® Insight XDR dramatically improved detection accuracy while slashing false positives by more than 30%.

Deployment was also fast. 

To strengthen coverage for its security team, the ALDO Group soon adopted CrowdStrike Falcon® Complete Next-Gen MDR, CrowdStrike’s 24/7 managed detection and response service. With only four engineers covering endpoints, incidents, and investigations, Falcon Complete Next-Gen MDR became an essential force multiplier.

“My team wears every hat — red, blue, purple — so offloading detections and alerts to Falcon Complete allows us to focus on projects that bring value to the business,” Lee said. “They’re not just a vendor; they’re part of our team.”

Vulnerability management had long been a pain point. With thousands of issues across a global retail footprint, the ALDO Group needed a way to distinguish between noise and genuine risk. CrowdStrike Falcon® Exposure Management brought clarity through its ExPRT.AI rating feature, which prioritizes vulnerabilities based on whether they’re actively exploited in the wild, not just on CVSS scores.

“Before Exposure Management, my team would ask, ‘Where do we start?’” Lee said. “Now there’s a roadmap. The platform guides us toward the vulnerabilities that matter most.”

The shift transformed vulnerability management from an endless backlog to a structured, data-driven process. Falcon Exposure Management helps the team act quickly on what’s critical, defer what’s low-risk, and continuously measure progress toward reducing exposure. “It’s a game changer,” Lee said. “We finally have focus and direction.”

Until recently, the ALDO Group had never operated a SIEM. But as the company matured its cybersecurity program, centralized visibility became non-negotiable. After evaluating major vendors, including Splunk and Microsoft, the decision was clear: nearly 80% of the ALDO Group’s telemetry already lived in CrowdStrike, so adopting CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen SIEM would consolidate data, reduce complexity, and deliver faster insights.

Integration took less than two months. “The built-in connectors were seamless, and CrowdStrike’s implementation team guided us from A to Z,” said Lee. “Even if we didn’t already use the Falcon platform, we still would’ve chosen it.”

The results exceeded expectations. Analysts described Falcon Next-Gen SIEM as “lightning-fast” and “night and day” compared to other platforms they had used. Searches that once took minutes now return results in seconds. The team can ingest data from third-party sources like Cisco firewalls and email gateways, creating a single view across the environment.

“Next-gen SIEM changed how my team works,” Lee said. “We now have full telemetry, faster detection, and a unified view of the entire enterprise.”

As AI tools began proliferating across the ALDO Group’s business, Lee recognized a new risk: sensitive information moving beyond the company’s control. CrowdStrike Falcon® Data Protection provided the visibility to address that risk head-on.

“We had an incident where an employee tried to upload a sensitive file into ChatGPT,” Lee recalled. “Because of Falcon Data Protection, we caught it immediately.”

Falcon Data Protection allows the ALDO Group to monitor sensitive data movement in real time, detect violations, and educate employees before harm occurs. The team is now building policies to enforce AI-related data controls across departments.

“Falcon Data Protection gave us visibility we never had before,” Lee said. “It’s helping us prepare for what’s next … not just protecting data, but protecting the integrity of our AI initiatives.”

Today, the ALDO Group operates a nearly complete Falcon platform, with modules for endpoint security, SIEM, exposure management, identity protection, cloud security, and data protection. All are accessible through a single pane of glass. For Lee, the impact is both operational and strategic.

“The thing I love most is having one console that contains all my telemetry,” he said. “Going from a bare-bones stack to a robust, integrated platform used to feel like a pipe dream. Now it’s our reality.”

Equally important is the partnership behind it. “In over 25 years in cybersecurity, I’ve never worked with a vendor as responsive as CrowdStrike,” Lee concluded. “They listen, they act on feedback, and they share our mission to stop breaches. That’s why we trust them to help protect our business and our brand.”