It is a common refrain in security circles that “nobody loves their vulnerability management tool.”  CrowdStrike may have just proved to be the exception. 

We are proud to announce that CrowdStrike is the only vendor named a Customers’ Choice in the 2024 Gartner “Voice of the Customer” Report for Vulnerability Assessment. In this report, CrowdStrike is the only vendor placed in the upper right quadrant, meaning we received a Customers’ Choice Distinction. This placement indicates we meet or exceed both the average Overall Experience and the average User Interest and Adoption for the segment. 

In addition to the recent IDC MarketScape Report recognizing CrowdStrike as a Leader for Risk-Based Vulnerability Management, we believe this recognition is a validation not only from the analyst community but from those it matters the most: our customers.

At the center of this is Falcon® Exposure Management. We believe the overwhelming customer response to Falcon Exposure Management is one of the reasons for our recognition as a Customers’ Choice in this report. 

Falcon Exposure Management is a comprehensive risk and vulnerability management solution that incorporates all the capabilities of CrowdStrike Falcon® Spotlight vulnerability management, CrowdStrike Falcon® Discover asset management, CrowdStrike Falcon® Surface external attack surface management and much more. 

Legacy VM Tools: A Test in Patience

The enthusiasm around Falcon Exposure Management stems from its ability to address many of the challenges associated with legacy vulnerability management tools, which are often costly and slow to deploy, operationalize and generate results.

Setting up legacy vulnerability management (VM) tools is often an exercise in patience. The network scanners are on-premises appliances that require painstaking sizing and tuning. In order to get a high-fidelity network scan, the VM team needs to obtain and manage credentials to each target system being scanned, with the right privilege, and deal with ongoing password rotation. 

Further, due to the disruptive nature of these scans, scanning windows must be negotiated with various departments and system owners so business doesn’t slow to a crawl. It could be weeks before a complete scan of the entire infrastructure can be finished. This doesn’t take into consideration the process before the scan, which involves updates for new vulnerability signatures or ongoing firewall administration to ensure the scanner can reach every system.  

The complex nature of these tools makes legacy VM extremely difficult to operationalize, which reduces its effectiveness and adds to the total cost of ownership. Rather than managing vulnerabilities, security teams are instead focusing on managing the headache of their VM tool. The worst part is these long scanning cycles unnecessarily expose organizations to critical vulnerabilities and zero-days at a time when adversaries are quickly weaponizing them. 

Why We Believe CrowdStrike Is the Only Customers’ Choice

Falcon Exposure Management, which runs on the same unified, lightweight agent utilized by the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform, is a breeze to deploy. You simply switch it on. There is virtually no maintenance involved. It offers instant vulnerability assessment compared to legacy VM tools, which can take days or weeks.  

The Falcon® platform empowers security teams to bridge data gaps, pivot across rich threat contexts, leverage AI to effectively prioritize vulnerabilities, and quickly zoom in on adversaries to stop breaches. CrowdStrike research has shown Falcon Exposure Management can reduce external attack surface by up to 75%¹ while keeping out 95%² of the vulnerability noise.

Gartner® Peer Insights™ customer reviews share inputs such as:

“The best use of it comes when there is a zero-day release and we have it ready on the console with the impacted machines without spending any effort to scan. The up-to-date vulnerability information has also helped us triage detections and incidents in the best way.”

“You don’t need to deploy an extra agent to have this functionality, the data is already there, and if you are currently using CrowdStrike Falcon as your Endpoint Detection and Response product you only need to enable this and voila! It will work, so having everything in a single pane of glass is always more than welcomed, this will reduce alert fatigue, will help our analysts to take less time on remediation and use that time for investigations.”

Customers overwhelmingly prefer CrowdStrike’s approach to building security tools with its lightweight agent, cloud-native unified platform and powerful AI. Falcon Exposure Management complements CrowdStrike’s leading security solutions with a proactive, easy-to-deploy vulnerability and risk management solution that allows customers to reduce complexity, quickly operationalize and cut down on redundant spending so security teams can do what they do best: get ahead of adversaries and stop breaches.

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Gartner Peer Insights content consists of the opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences with the vendors listed on the platform, should not be construed as statements of fact, nor do they represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in this content nor makes any warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this content, about its accuracy or completeness, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Additional Resources

• CrowdStrike was named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Endpoint Protection Platforms. Learn more in this blog post.
• See how Falcon Exposure Management can help you discover and manage vulnerabilities and other exposures in your environments. 
• Make prioritization painless and efficient. Watch how CrowdStrike Falcon Spotlight enables IT staff to improve visibility with custom filters and team dashboards. 
• Test CrowdStrike next-gen antivirus for yourself with a free trial of CrowdStrike® Falcon Prevent™.

1. Based on Falcon Surface product data.
2. This number is a project estimate of average benefit based on recorded metrics provided by customers during pre-sale motions that compare the value of CrowdStrike with the customer’s incumbent solution. Actual realized value will depend on individual customer’s module deployment and environment.