Universidad Europea de Madrid Cuts Security Investigation Time by 70% with CrowdStrike Charlotte AI

When Daniel Milner Resel, who leads cybersecurity at Universidad Europea de Madrid (UEM), looks at the university’s security posture, he sees far more than just a network. He sees 80,000 students and 4,000 staff members across 50 locations, all relying on a digital infrastructure that must be resilient in the face of constant cyber threats.

As UEM transitioned to a multicloud environment spanning Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, Milner realized the university’s security model was hitting a wall. Nearly 70% of its new cloud environment was invisible to its existing security tools. This consumed his team with so-called "mechanical" analysis, including manually stitching together data and updating spreadsheets just to maintain a baseline of protection.

UEM found its answer in the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform. By consolidating endpoint, cloud, and SIEM into a single platform and embedding AI-driven analysis directly into the team's workflow, the university fundamentally changed how its security team works.

“My reality is different today,” explained Milner. “We are two steps ahead in evolving our cyber posture.”

Recognizing that incremental fixes wouldn’t solve the problems with their older security model, Milner and his team launched a comprehensive evaluation of the security market. Over four months, they assessed multiple vendors across endpoint protection, cloud security, and SIEM. The goal was to find a single platform capable of protecting a complex, multicloud environment without adding operational overhead.

According to Milner, what set CrowdStrike apart wasn’t just individual capabilities, but how those capabilities worked together. Rather than forcing the team to integrate and maintain separate tools, the Falcon platform offers unified protection with shared telemetry, consistent workflows, and AI-driven analysis, natively built in from the start.

“By far, CrowdStrike is technically superior,” Milner said. “It was one of the most critical decisions I’ve made.”

While platform consolidation was important, CrowdStrike® Charlotte AI quickly became the most visible driver of day-to-day change. Milner estimates that before CrowdStrike, as much as 80% of an analyst’s time was spent on repetitive, mechanical work.

Charlotte AI now performs much of that work automatically. By analyzing activity across endpoint, cloud, and log data in real time, the agentic cybersecurity analyst presents the security team with prioritized, context-rich investigations instead of raw alerts. As a result, UEM has reduced the time spent in the initial phase of a security event by approximately 70%.

“Before, we were managing endless spreadsheets and sitting in meetings where nobody really knew what was going on,” Milner said. “Now the mechanical analysis is finished before my team even starts.”

With that burden removed, the team has reclaimed time. Instead of reacting to alerts as they arrive, analysts now spend time reviewing trends across incidents, validating assumptions about risk, and preparing for scenarios they expect to face in the coming months. That work simply wasn’t possible before.

CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen SIEM reinforced those gains by replacing UEM’s previous SIEM deployment. Rather than manually tuning and maintaining a standalone system, the team now analyzes telemetry from more than 10,000 endpoints alongside data from cloud, network, and Microsoft environments in a single interface.

“Falcon Next-Gen SIEM is very fast, but more importantly it’s easy," Milner said.

This simplicity has translated directly into faster insight. Since deployment, UEM has improved detection and response times, while surfacing activity that previously went unnoticed or took months to uncover.

CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security extended that visibility into UEM’s cloud environments, giving the team a unified view across Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. For the first time, security teams can see misconfigurations, risky behavior, and potential exposure across cloud-native services in one place — and they can act on it quickly.

“With Falcon Cloud Security, we get incredible visibility and protection across our entire posture. And the speed is impressive,” Milner said.

The result is a cloud security model that keeps pace with how the university operates, enabling innovation without sacrificing control.

Building on those gains, UEM recently chose to deploy CrowdStrike Falcon® Complete Next-Gen MDR to manage its endpoint and cloud security deployments. By extending its security operations with CrowdStrike’s expert-led managed detection and response service, UEM aims to further reduce operational burden while ensuring continuous monitoring and rapid response across its environment.

Beyond technology and services, Milner points to CrowdStrike’s partnership as a critical differentiator. Unlike previous experiences with large vendors, support didn’t fade after purchase. CrowdStrike remained close as UEM evolved its security posture.

“I’ve never felt alone,” he said. “CrowdStrike’s engineers, success managers, and technical teams are always behind us.”

Today, UEM describes CrowdStrike in three words: trustworthy, reliable, and stable. By consolidating on the Falcon platform and embedding AI into daily operations, the university has moved from managing risk reactively to proactively stopping threats.