The Platform Approach to Cybersecurity

The world has seen a sharp increase in cyber threats in recent years. Adversaries are gaining speed, refining their tactics, and targeting gaps in businesses’ evolving infrastructure. The digital perimeter now extends far beyond traditional corporate boundaries to include cloud environments, on-premises deployments, and remote devices.

As businesses scale their technological footprint, their attack surface grows. To protect this sprawling digital ecosystem, organisations have often deployed point security products. Many organisations now manage nearly 50 security tools on average, with some juggling more than 140. This patchwork of point products slows operations, increases costs, creates complexity, and increases the risk of breaches.

A platform approach to cybersecurity offers a better solution to protecting the digital ecosystem. By unifying capabilities under one platform, organisations can eliminate the inefficiencies of managing multiple tools, streamline operations, and respond to threats faster and more effectively.
 
To see the platform approach in action, consider the challenges of securing cloud environments. As organisations increasingly rely on cloud infrastructure, they encounter dynamic workloads, expanding data estates, and unique security complexities that demand a unified defense.
 

The Challenge of Cloud Complexity

Cloud security challenges are amplified by the shared responsibility model, which dictates that cloud providers are responsible for securing their own infrastructure and customers are responsible for securing their data and applications running in the cloud. Many businesses, unsure of what they need to protect, have responded to this model by deploying multiple solutions to secure their cloud infrastructure — exacerbating tool sprawl and creating gaps that adversaries can exploit.

Threat actors have taken notice: The CrowdStrike 2024 Global Threat Report found cloud intrusions increased by 75% between 2022 and 2023. Attackers are also moving faster than ever, with the average breakout time — the time between initial compromise and lateral movement — only 62 minutes. Adversaries have even begun to adopt hybrid attacks that traverse cloud and endpoint environments, exploiting gaps in security coverage and visibility caused by point products. Organisations need a way to tip the odds back in their favour.
 

Defending Against Evolving Threats

The best approach to secure cloud environments is to use a cybersecurity platform that encompasses vital capabilities, including:

• Cloud Work Protection (CWP)
• Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
• Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM)
• Application Security Posture Management (ASPM)
• Data Security Posture Management (DSPM).
   

When delivered through a single platform, these capabilities eliminate blind spots and protection gaps, providing comprehensive visibility and control. Unified platforms enable security teams to quickly detect, prioritise, and remediate threats, ensuring consistent protection across cloud infrastructure.

The benefits of platform-delivered cybersecurity extend well beyond the cloud. As organisations look to protect their endpoints, data, identities and applications, many find that deploying these protections from a unified platform centralises visibility and management across the environment. This integration helps reduce complexity, improve response times, and enhances protection across multiple layers of an organisation’s infrastructure — with less performance overhead.
 

Everything Working in Concert

The platform approach benefits more than just core protections – it eliminates complexity and improves the productivity of the security team by unifying critical technologies, such as Next-Gen SIEM. Legacy SIEM technology is notorious for diminishing performance and escalating costs as data volumes surge. Next-gen SIEM is cloud-architected to converge data, AI and workflow automation into a unified platform, allowing security teams to operate faster and save money. The platform approach streamlines data ingestion because platform data is natively available in next-gen SIEM, which speeds up investigations.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is another technology better delivered from a platform than a point solution. When delivered as an integrated component of a cybersecurity platform, GenAI can enable analysts to get up to speed faster and draw from all platform technologies to generate the best outputs. The platform approach can also simplify procurement and deployment complexities, facilitating more seamless adoption.
 

Stronger Protection with a Unified Cybersecurity Platform

As the threat landscape grows more complex, organisations must shift from fragmented cybersecurity solutions to a unified platform approach. Consolidation enables comprehensive visibility, faster threat detection, and rapid response across an organisation’s entire digital ecosystem.

The CrowdStrike Falcon® cybersecurity platform delivers powerful, unified protection by combining endpoint, cloud, identity, and data security into a single, AI- and cloud-native solution. Built on a lightweight agent and enriched with real-time threat intelligence and AI-driven analytics, the Falcon platform provides unmatched visibility and proactive defense to stop breaches.

To learn more about the AI-native CrowdStrike Falcon platform, click here.