CrowdStrike extends cloud security to Mission Cloud customers

CrowdStrike and AWS-focused managed service provider Mission Cloud have announced a strategic partnership to bring the former's cloud security offerings to the latter's managed service platform.

As part of the launch on Thursday, users of Mission Cloud's MSP Mission Cloud One will have the option to utilize multiple CrowdStrike cloud security offerings, including CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security as well as its cloud detection and response offering.

Mission Cloud is a managed cloud service provider that offers monitoring, maintenance and security to AWS cloud customers. Mission Cloud founder and CEO Simon Anderson told TechTarget Editorial that although AWS already has several native security offerings and tools, including those that Mission Cloud already uses, CrowdStrike was the right fit for this partnership because of its "library of expertise."

"The nature of this relationship is that it's very proactive," Anderson said. "The CrowdStrike team, service and software offering -- they're surfacing threats to us so that we can react to them on behalf of our customers, whereas a lot of the other tools out there, you have to deploy them and you then have to know how to use them. This gives us a very proactive response, which is important given the fact that a lot of attacks now can be executed within minutes."

In CrowdStrike's 2024 Global Threat Report published in February, the vendor found that cloud intrusions increased 75% year over year. Cases of cybercrime where threat actors intentionally compromised cloud workloads similarly shot up 110%. A large portion of this activity, 29%, was due to ransomware threat actor Scattered Spider, which was credited with attacks against Okta, Caesars Entertainment and MGM Resorts last year.

Anderson said the launch follows a ramp up of "a few months" getting Mission Cloud customers acclimated. He added that about half of its customers are using the new CrowdStrike offerings. The partnership represents a vendor-customer relationship between CrowdStrike and Mission Cloud respectively -- as Anderson said, "We're betting on CrowdStrike."

"Part of this for us strategically is, we wanted to work with the best of the best because we think there are going to be significant new threats that are going to emerge over the next year or two years that we want to protect our customers from," Anderson said.

CrowdStrike chief business officer Daniel Bernard said that an appeal to Mission Cloud was its focus on SMBs.

"I think what Mission Cloud really brings to the forefront is that, for a long time, the perspective was just the big companies and just the Fortune 500s that were really going all in on cloud," Bernard said. "And what's happening today is that the world has gone all-in on cloud. And that means small and medium businesses too. And for us, to properly serve these businesses and meet them where they are on their various stages of cloud maturity, with various capabilities ranging from none to full-fledged IT and security teams. We have to work with the right partners that help customers solve problems. And that's what Mission Cloud is doing."

In an email, Mona Chadha, director of infrastructure partnerships at AWS, told TechTarget Editorial that the strategic partnership "enhances solutions for customers to help accelerate innovation.

"This builds on the great work we've already been doing with both companies -- Mission Cloud was a launch partner for our recently announced SMB and Generative AI Competencies and an early adopter of Amazon Bedrock; and CrowdStrike, an early adopter of AWS Marketplace, is a proven security resource for AWS customers with more than $1B in AWS Marketplace sales," Chadha wrote. "We are pleased to see how two of our trusted partners are continuing to drive value for customers and build on their work with AWS."

Alexander Culafi is a senior information security news writer and podcast host for TechTarget Editorial.