CrowdStrike Fal.Con 2024 | Daniel Bernard | Crowdstrike & Punit Minocha | Zscaler

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Daniel Bernard

Chief Business Officer

CrowdStrike

Punit Minocha

EVP, Business and Corporate Development

Zscaler

Zscaler and CrowdStrike tackle complexity with zero-trust security collaboration

As cyber threats escalate in volume and complexity, vendors are increasingly adopting a collaborative, “better together” approach to security solutions. One such alliance, between CrowdStrike Inc. and Zscaler Inc., emphasizes zero-trust security as a critical component in defending against evolving attacks.This partnership, fueled by customer demand for deeper synergy, has led to the launch of several joint initiatives over a years-long partnership. By combining their cloud-native capabilities, CrowdStrike and Zscaler are paving the way for stronger, bidirectional protection strategies that prioritize securing user data across multiple threat vectors

play_circle_outline Revolutionizing Security: CrowdStrike and Zscaler's Long-Term Partnership for Zero Trust Integration

play_circle_outline Success stories from customer feedback driving partnership

play_circle_outline New integrations and enhancements to existing ones announced

play_circle_outline Importance of bidirectional data flow in integrations

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Daniel Bernard | Crowdstrike & Punit Minocha | Zscaler

Daniel Bernard

Chief Business Officer CrowdStrike

Punit Minocha

EVP, Business and Corporate Development Zscaler

Daniel Bernard, Chief Business Officer at CrowdStrike, and Punit Minocha, EVP Business Development at Zscaler, discussed their long-term partnership. They emphasized technology integrations for customers to embrace Zero Trust. The partnership began four years ago due to customer demand for better integration. Over a thousand customers now benefit. New integrations and products have been introduced to enhance security measures. Bidirectional data sharing and real-time threat detection capabilities were highlighted to showcase the partnership's strength. They s... Read more

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What kind of work have you done with Zscaler over the years and how has it helped customers fully embrace Zero Trust? add

What was the impetus for the partnership between the company and Cushman & Wakefield in the real estate business? add

What new integrations have been announced and how do they differ from past integrations? add

What is being discussed regarding the partnership between Zscaler and CrowdStrike and how it benefits customers in terms of threat intelligence and real-time data sharing? add

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Daniel Bernard | Crowdstrike & Punit Minocha | Zscaler

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Rebecca Knight

>> Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back to day one of theCUBE's live coverage of Fal.Con 2024 here in Las Vegas at the ARIA. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, sitting alongside my Co-Host, Co-Analyst, Co-Founder of theCUBE, Dave Vellante. We've got two great CUBE veterans for our next segment. We've got Daniel Bernard, he is the Chief Business Officer at CrowdStrike. Thank you so much for returning-

Daniel Bernard

>> Great to be here....

Rebecca Knight

>> to theCUBE, and Punit Minocha, EVP Business Development and Corporate Strategy at Zscaler. Thank you so much.

Punit Minocha

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> So I want to start by talking about your partnership, which it's a long term partnership, a story partnership, shall we say. Tell us a little bit more about how you work together.

Daniel Bernard

>> Sure. Well, we've done a lot of work with Zscaler over the years, both from a technology perspective, so that customers could really fully embrace Zero Trust. We secure the device, the cloud, etc. Zscaler, make sure that connectivity and authenticity is there. So I think in order to really bring a Zero Trust strategy to life, we want our customers using Zscaler to do that . This partnership wasn't just about the technology. It also extended to the people and how we've gone to market together, which we both will talk about. We have over a thousand customers using the integrations between our products, a lot of large enterprise wins. It's truly global. Our teams love working together. So happy customers, happy teams, happy companies.

Punit Minocha

>> That's right. That's right. Absolutely, DB. I'll tell you, this all started about four, four and a half years ago. We had a customer in the real estate business, Cushman & Wakefield. And they were using CrowdStrike, they were using Zscaler, quite disparate environments. And the , who pure coincidence I just ran into an hour ago, comes to us and says, "Listen, they have some telemetry. Can you ingest that into Zscaler? And at the same time, there's things that Zscaler is finding, can you signal that to CrowdStrike?" And that was the-

Rebecca Knight

>> It was a customer that started your partnership.

Punit Minocha

>> It was the customer. It was the customer that gave us the feedback. We sat down with the product teams and started whiteboarding, and the rest was history. And I ran into him and I explained that we have over a thousand customers now using that integration. He was ecstatic. And I can tell you, we have stories after stories where customers actually want to come on stage because they realize what we bring is the best of both worlds. Both companies are very confident in what we do. They're the market leaders on the end point in expanding out. We are in the market leaders on the network, we are expanding out. But we are confident in what we do and we want to partner with the best. So, get to a point where customers do not have to make compromises. And that's sort of where this all... That's the foundation, if you will.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah. And it makes it easier that you're a pure play, SaaSy play and not a conglomerate. But still, you know the mindset of most technology companies. And when you get together like that, it's like, "Okay, who owns it? Who's going to..." But so you had to work through that initially. Obviously now, it helps that you've got different swim lanes. But I wonder if you could sort of describe how you sorted that all out and how it's progressed.

Daniel Bernard

>> I think we want to give customers the choice. We hear loud and clear from hardware vendors that try and sell SaaSy, that we hear from the customers that they want to choose best-of-breed. And we've certainly demonstrated that with the numbers. If you look at the large enterprise traction that both companies have, the way that we go to market, we bring Zscaler in, the way Zscaler goes to market, they bring us in. Our CEOs talk at events together. It was interesting, I think there was an event in Miami that George spoke at with Jay about a year ago. And it was a customer event, and Jay asked, "How many of you in the room are CrowdStrike customers?" And 80% of the room raised their hand. So, we just have a really good cohorting in the market around... And I think it's also similar cultures in the companies. We really are obsessive about the customer, quick movers in innovation, wanting to stay ahead of the curve, taking the customer relationship really seriously, and executing very well in the market.

Punit Minocha

>> I couldn't say it any better. If you put the customer first and you have the conviction that what you're building is best-of-breed, the rest will all take care of itself. And I think that mindset has really helped us. Not having the customer make the trade-off, not trying to push them into licensing deals where they perhaps procure product but are not able to deploy it. I mean, how is it making the customer satisfied?

Daniel Bernard

>> One other fun thing to add is the validation we get from the ecosystem around what we do together. So, we work together with the same breed sellers, the same partners. You go to Worldwide Technologies, you go to CDW, you go to SHI, you go to Optiv. And the list goes on in Europe and in Asia, we land campaigns together. It's called ZStrike. So I have all these other vendors, there's 98 of them here on the floor. They pop up and they're like, "How do I get a ZStrike?"

Punit Minocha

>> That's right.

Daniel Bernard

>> And you hear the same.

Punit Minocha

>> Yep, absolutely, absolutely.

Dave Vellante

>> Hey, it's not just go to market, there's obviously integrations that you guys do. You have news this week.

Punit Minocha

>> That's right.

Dave Vellante

>> You want to talk about that and share with the audience?

Punit Minocha

>> Sure, absolutely. So, we announced a whole bunch of new integrations. Some are perhaps solidifying the past integrations that we had. Simple examples that I can think of there on the endpoint, they have a really good idea of the risk that might be associated with you, Rebecca, when you're going out to the internet. And wouldn't it be useful if before you went out to the internet, Zscaler when you're going, out looked at your risk or consumed your risk, if you had a higher risk, maybe hold off on doing so. Right? So, those are the types of integrations our customers use. We had implemented those about three, four years ago, but we realized it was a one-to-one integration between Zscaler and CrowdStrike. They have really released a new initiative called Foundry, which is a more open platform upon which multiple partners can build. We have released a context engine. Again, similar approach where we are allowing multiple partners to build on that. That allows for a more resilient, tolerant approach. And listen, things happen in security, things happen in IT. It is our job as vendors to make sure that we are adapting and learning, and build something that is fail-safe, so to speak. So, that was one of the things that we did where we hardened the integrations that we had built in the past. And then in addition to that, there's things that we are starting to do. There are a goldmine of user data at the end point. And today, one of the things that is a board-level discussion is cyber, cyber security. A board is always asking, "What is the risk associated with cyber right now?" And to the point where the SEC is actually mandating that once a year, the 10K has to include a cyber risk. And so, we released a product around Risk360, that is ingesting some of the telemetry from CrowdStrike. Similarly, I think, why don't you talk a little about Next-Gen SIEM and the work we're doing there?

Daniel Bernard

>> Totally. Next-Gen SIEM is a big part of our growth strategy, taking every single customer console and really turning it into a SIEM. And so, being able to ingest all the user logs from Zscaler, huge value add, and also some of this risk information as well. So, that as you contextualize what's going on with a threat, is it an alert? Is it a threat? What do I action? Bringing in, and most of our demos, we showcase how Zscaler brings the network perspective into the SIEM experience to create what we call Next-Gen SIEM. And I think just to add the vision, last year we were here talking and we released Foundry last year, which is really our app developer factory, is what I'd like to call it. And so to see partners like Zscaler embracing that, you can use any of the functions of the platform and create your own custom app. So they use some of their core capabilities, used our capabilities, and created a solution on our platform that really articulates and illustrates the value of this, the crowd and the platform, and how CrowdStrike is really a unifier to bring cyber security together.

Dave Vellante

>> So, it's data that feeds the visuals and the dashboards, automation. And then of course, you've got AI that you're moving throughout. So, that's the platform piece that you're then putting out there that people can leverage.

Daniel Bernard

>> Exactly. And the fact that this is all bidirectional stuff.

Dave Vellante

>> Exactly.

Daniel Bernard

>> These have all been baked, thought through.

Dave Vellante

>> That's important.

Daniel Bernard

>> That's very important.

Dave Vellante

>> Oh, yeah.

Daniel Bernard

>> And also battle tested. The fact that when you have the kind of adoption that we both have of the integrations, we have more customers that use both of our products. But the fact that over a thousand have actually integrated and clicked the buttons to integrate it and turn it on, this stuff works and it works at scale.

Dave Vellante

>> So bidirectional, the reason you caught my attention is because so much of this is read-only, one-way, asynchronous, too slow. So when you say bidirectional, you're talking about... Can you explain?

Daniel Bernard

>> I'm talking about how we're sending data to Zscaler and they're sending data to CrowdStrike. And there's real connective tissue, versus bubble gum and rubber bands for a press release. Four years into this partnership together, robust enterprise-grade solutions, things happening in the Zscaler console, things happening in the CrowdStrike console. That's why our customers see the value in best-of-breed.

Punit Minocha

>> It's all realtime. So CrowdStrike, market leader in threat intel. For customers who subscribe to the threat intel, have the ability to take that threat intel and immediately populate and enforce it. It's a business policy that based on the threat intel, the user no longer has access to certain applications. So, that's all happening realtime. This is not something where because there's enough trust built in, we have confidence that what is coming of high telemetry with high value.

Dave Vellante

>> With deep integrations, because I'll just share with the audience. A lot of times you mentioned just bubble gum band-aids and a press release. A lot of times, these automations are fragile scripts and they just break. Something changes and, "Oh, hey, we got to go back." And it's this manual effort.

Punit Minocha

>> That's right.

Dave Vellante

>> It doesn't work, especially at today's speeds.

Punit Minocha

>> That's right.

Daniel Bernard

>> Totally, totally. And if you look like in the market, we sell to the same folks, it makes sense. We compete with the same folks. There's a lot of reasons that we all work together and that we win together. And again, it starts with the technology, but it goes to the shared DNA in the culture. And you really can't buy that, you have to just build that and have it come to be.

Dave Vellante

>> You guys can bring that and the ecosystem. What'd you say, 98?

Daniel Bernard

>> Yeah, 97 here exhibiting.

Dave Vellante

>> You're going to outgrow the ARIA soon.

Daniel Bernard

>> Yeah, totally.

Dave Vellante

>> It's insane.

Daniel Bernard

>> I know. I know, every year. I think last year it was like a smaller number. So every year it grows, it's a record year. Attendees, partners, exhibitors. I mean this is the ecosystem, this is the crowd.

Rebecca Knight

>> So, let's talk about this ecosystem here. I mean, you're already talking about how your customers are giving you business ideas, giving you feedback to get into new kinds of partnerships. Paint a broad brush picture of why partnerships are so critical in cybersecurity.

Daniel Bernard

>> We're solving really complex problems, and there's about 4,000 different vendors in cybersecurity, which is a lot. Very few of them ever reached the milestone of a hundred million in ARR and are really ready for the enterprise. But if you think about, how do you stop a threat? First, you've got to be able to see it. And then you need to be able to take an action, and ideally have that action be automated or AI powered or something so that you don't need a lot of humans. No single vendor in security does everything. And so having an open ecosystem approach where you can bring together best-of-breed is really the right strategy, number one. But number two, how matters. What I mean by that is, then we get back into bubble gum and rubber bands, you really need things that are battle tested, that work together, that work bidirectionally, and that solve different problems. Zscaler solves different problems than CrowdStrike solves. So, the third part of it is, what are other parts of the technology solution space that come together to make these things even stickier? So I think a good example for both of us is AWS marketplace, where we work with customers together. We help them optimize their budgets, we help them on their cloud transformation. We're cloud native, they're cloud native. Customers really love buying our technology through resellers on AWS marketplace. And then it's a win-win for everybody.

Punit Minocha

>> Exactly .

Daniel Bernard

>> So, these things kind of all come in virtuous cycles.

Punit Minocha

>> Yep. The only perhaps, things I might add is security does tend to be very fragmented. And when it's as fragmented as it can be, it adds complexity. When it adds complexity, there's room for error, there's-

Daniel Bernard

>> Risk....

Punit Minocha

>> stuff that happens, risk gets introduced. And so, there is generally a trend towards trying to consolidate that. I 100% agree. But at the same time, there's certain swim lanes that are very natural, and that's sort of where Zscaler and CrowdStrike have landed that allow ourselves to have that open ecosystem mindset, partner with the best, and go solve customers problems.

Dave Vellante

>> So I'm glad you said trying to consolidate, because it's hard.

Punit Minocha

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> So, square the circle for me. You got the startup accelerator, you guys are both consolidators. You got platforms .

Punit Minocha

>> Absolutely.

Dave Vellante

>> And yet you're funding all these startups because there's problems to be solved.

Daniel Bernard

>> There's always problems to be solved.

Dave Vellante

>> And that is part of the challenge. The innovation is so fast and furious that it's really challenging for customers to reduce their number of vendors in their stack.

Daniel Bernard

>> And look, we both have to earn the consolidation that we deliver. We can say we're consolidators and we are consolidators, but we're consolidators because customers, they talk with their wallets. So, there's room for everybody in this market, there's room for innovation. We want new innovators, dreamers to get excited and passionate and form new companies. And that's wonderful, because they create new spaces. And maybe we're already there, maybe we're not there. That all doesn't matter. It's more products for us to integrate into, it's more problems for us to solve, and more things we can work on together.

Punit Minocha

>> Both sides have the awareness that we don't know it all, and we've got to keep learning. That growth mindset, if you will. That allows us to continue to make investments in startups in others to learn and see what the entire creative industry is doing around us. Because some of that might give us ideas that what we might use together.

Rebecca Knight

>> Funding the next generation of cybersecurity innovation, really.

Daniel Bernard

>> Yep.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent.

Daniel Bernard

>> Exactly.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, Bernard, thank you so much. Punit, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure having you on.

Punit Minocha

>> A pleasure.

Dave Vellante

>> Thanks, guys.

Daniel Bernard

>> Great to be here.

Punit Minocha

>> Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage.

Dave Vellante

>> George Kurtz, up next.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yes, George Kurtz.

Dave Vellante

>> George is coming.

Rebecca Knight

>> Oh, my gosh. Yes. Thank you.

Dave Vellante

>> Stay tuned.

Daniel Bernard

>> The man, the myth, the legend.

Rebecca Knight

>> Exactly. Stay tuned for George Kurtz, coming up very soon. You're watching theCUBE, key leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.