Founded in 1818, the Illinois State Treasurer’s Office is dedicated to protecting the state’s financial portfolio. The agency manages approximately $38 billion, comprising local and state funds, retirement accounts and college savings plans.

A recent overhaul of the aging IT environment reduced the organization’s server count by over 90%, slashed IT-related costs by 40% and cut carbon emissions by 27 tons. To protect the new infrastructure, a security solution from one of the state’s existing suppliers was deployed, but it immediately started generating nearly 30,000 false positives a day that quickly overwhelmed the in-house team.

A rapid proof of concept (POC) was conducted with solutions from the CrowdStrike Falcon^® portfolio and went so well that the incumbent tools were immediately discarded. The improvements in resource utilization and team effectiveness have meant that the CrowdStrike solution paid for itself in less than a year.

CrowdStrike was chosen in part because of the ability to cope with complexity and the opinion that the Falcon platform uniquely offers a true “single pane of glass” experience for security professionals. With a cloud-native platform and lightweight agent, the CrowdStrike solution was implemented with minimal impact to business operations and delivered a seamless cutover for end users. Enhanced visibility and threat intelligence provide a fully comprehensive picture of potential attacks across the entire environment.