Frost & Sullivan Recognition Validates the Strategic Shift Toward Consolidated, Runtime-First Security Architectures
CrowdStrike has successfully secured its position as the market standard for modern cloud security, earning Frost & Sullivan’s 2026 Company of the Year for Cloud Workload Security (CWS) and the 2025 Company of the Year for Global SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM). This marks the second consecutive time the company has received these accolades, signaling a definitive industry preference for unified platforms over disparate tools. These recognitions serve as critical validation of a security strategy that prioritizes runtime protection across cloud workloads, SaaS environments, and rapidly evolving AI infrastructures.
The necessity for such comprehensive defense is driven by the acceleration of AI, which is expanding the cloud attack surface faster than traditional models can manage. Organizations are increasingly moving away from fragmented, posture-only solutions that fail to address active threats in real-time. Frost & Sullivan’s report confirms that the future of cloud security lies in consolidation, highlighting the ability of the Falcon® platform to deliver operational efficiency and SOC-grade detection through a single, lightweight architecture.
Key Insights at a Glance
- Runtime is the New Standard: Effective cloud defense now requires active runtime protection to stop breaches, rendering passive posture-only tools insufficient for modern threats.
- AI-Driven Risk Mitigation: As AI expands the attack surface, security frameworks must extend runtime protection to govern AI infrastructure and non-human identities.
- SaaS Security Evolution: Leading SSPM solutions must now correlate SaaS findings with endpoint and identity telemetry to expose risks missed by traditional isolationist approaches.
- Consolidation Strategy: Reducing operational complexity through a unified platform is essential for securing hybrid and multi-cloud environments at scale.
The Limitations of Fragmented Security
The modern cloud environment has become a primary battleground where adversaries aggressively exploit blind spots created by siloed security stacks. Elia Zaitsev, chief technology officer at CrowdStrike, notes that fragmentation creates significant vulnerabilities that attackers are quick to leverage. Traditional security approaches often rely on static posture management, providing a snapshot of compliance without offering the active defense mechanisms necessary to stop a breach in progress.
This “posture-only” approach creates a false sense of security. Relying solely on posture management is akin to inspecting a building’s blueprints for structural weaknesses while failing to hire security guards to stop a break-in; knowing where the doors are doesn’t prevent an intruder from kicking them down. Frost & Sullivan specifically notes that CrowdStrike outperforms these fragmented offerings by combining runtime defense with code-to-cloud visibility.
Market Agitation: The AI Expansion
The stakes have been raised dramatically by the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence. AI workloads and AI-powered SaaS applications are not only increasing the volume of data but are fundamentally altering the geometry of the cloud attack surface. Can fragmented, posture-only tools truly keep pace when AI accelerates the expansion of the cloud attack surface beyond human scale?
The answer is clearly no. The Frost & Sullivan reports underscore that AI adoption requires a shift toward active protection delivered at runtime. Without this, organizations lack the ability to detect and govern AI-driven risks or protect the underlying infrastructure supporting these advanced applications. The integration of AI necessitates a security model that can adapt as quickly as the technology itself evolves.
Strategic Solution: Unified Runtime Defense
The solution to these compounding complexities is the consolidation of security functions into a unified, runtime-powered platform. CrowdStrike’s Falcon® Cloud Security addresses this by delivering end-to-end visibility and automated defense across the entire cloud workload lifecycle. By integrating cloud, endpoint, identity, and data protection, the Falcon platform provides the pre-runtime and runtime protection required to secure hybrid environments.
Furthermore, CrowdStrike’s leadership in SSPM demonstrates the power of correlation. By connecting SaaS security findings with broader identity and endpoint telemetry, the platform exposes risks that traditional tools miss. Falcon® Shield extends this protection to SaaS environments, covering human, non-human, and AI agent identities to ensure a comprehensive defense against modern adversaries.
Future Outlook
As organizations continue to scale their reliance on AI and multi-cloud architectures, the consolidation of security tools will transition from a strategic advantage to an operational necessity. The validation from Frost & Sullivan suggests that the market will increasingly reject fragmented point solutions in favor of unified platforms capable of delivering real-time, runtime protection. Ultimately, the ability to secure AI and SaaS environments through a single agent will define the next generation of resilient enterprise infrastructure.
About CrowdStrike
CrowdStrike (NASDAQ: CRWD), a global cybersecurity leader, has redefined modern security with the world’s most advanced cloud-native platform for protecting critical areas of enterprise risk – endpoints and cloud workloads, identity and data.
Powered by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud and world-class AI, the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform leverages real-time indicators of attack, threat intelligence, evolving adversary tradecraft and enriched telemetry from across the enterprise to deliver hyper-accurate detections, automated protection and remediation, elite threat hunting and prioritized observability of vulnerabilities.
Purpose-built in the cloud with a single lightweight-agent architecture, the Falcon platform delivers rapid and scalable deployment, superior protection and performance, reduced complexity and immediate time-to-value.
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