RubrikX and CrowdStrike Forge Alliance for Next-Generation Identity Security

Hey, everyone. Welcome back here to Tech Drunk tv. I have two guests to introduce you to in this ep in this episode of, uh, or in this segment of Tech drunk tv.

First of all, well, you could tell from their backgrounds who, who I guess, but let me first introduce you to Philip v Verlo. Philip is the field CTO for EMEA or, and a PJ over at Rubrik. Is it Rubrik X now, or just Rubrik?

Uh, good question actually. So, uh, it is Rubrik, but I'm part of Rubrik X, which is sort of the incubation team, if you will, within Rubrik. So we get to do all of the cool new stuff within the larger organization.

Oh, so you're the cool kids on the team. It's very cool. Very nice.

So that's Rubrik X part of Rubrik, and then let me also introduce you too. He's been on our show before, my friend Christian Rodriguez, who's field CTO, also at CrowdStrike. We have two field CTOs here today.

What a, what? A hall. Christian, welcome.

Good to see you again, my friend. Great to see Alan. Thanks for having me again.

So, Philip, you and I were talking a little off camera before we get started. You have a history in the security space. If, if you don't mind, just take a few moments, give our audience a sense of your journey of how you came to be the, uh, field, CTFE EA in a PJ at Rubrik X.

Uh, sure. Yeah, so I've been in mostly infrastructure, uh, for 25 plus years now. So I worked at, uh, VMware and Riverbed and, and Citrix.

Um, but at a certain point I sort of jumped into the security, uh, space, like, uh, obviously Riverbed and Citrix. They have like, uh, VPN and application firewall technology that sort of let me down that path. Uh, and then ultimately, uh, I joined Rubrik 10 years ago or so, just about 10 years ago.

Um, and yeah, we are focusing mostly on, on cyber resilience. So it's a nice combination of both the infrastructure side and the security side coming together, which is like, uh, for me it's a, a perfect, uh, sweet spot to, uh, to be in essentially. Absolutely.

Fantastic. And Christian from people who maybe are interested in your journey. Yeah.

Uh, so I've been with CrowdStrike, uh, for, um, going on 11 years now. Um, and started out as kind of the first of like four, uh, systems engineers. Um, kind of worn a variety of different hats here, building our MSSP and channel programs.

They're building the healthcare program, um, and been in the fuel CTO role for about three years. But prior to this I've been with, uh, you know, a variety of different cybersecurity companies. Um, we worked on the practitioner side.

I've done a lot of offensive security and, um, yeah, it's just been really little over 22 years of, of cyber experience though, Of fun, of, of cyber fun. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Um, so Christian, I I'm going to, I'll stay with you on this one. I think most of our audience is very familiar with CrowdStrike. Yeah, right?

You guys, uh, you know, they've built a, uh, kind of soup to nuts, if you will, security practice. Yeah. Uh, and, and, and it's funny, you know, I, I remember when I first, you know, saw George was starting CrowdStrike, and I was like, is there room for another big security company?

Right? Yeah. Yeah.

And, and certainly there was, and, and CrowdStrike's done a lot of things. Um, but, you know, in this age of ai, I, I think we're all throwing the cards up in the air a little bit to see where they land differently with, you know, different partnerships, different relationships, different ways of doing things. What could you tell us new about CrowdStrike, maybe Christian, that our audience may not be aware of?

Uh, I'm gonna need, I'm gonna need another hour for that. Um, I mean, we, we just got off the heels of our, our annual Falcon, uh, conference Yes. Uh, in Vegas.

And, uh, there was just a, a plethora of announcements, but I think the, the common theme is that we are doubling down on, uh, really so transformation by incorporating more agentic AI into our platform. Uh, to your, to your comment, when I started with the company, there were three things that we did. There was endpoint security, there's threat hunting, there's an intelligence component.

Uh, and now there's over 30 modules, right? And I, I hate to even say modules because we, our goal is to ultimately remove a lot of the stitching that enterprises have with disparate security tools. And our goal is to make the, the, the integrations and the, the story and the narrative of how to stop an attack and how to stop a breach as seamless as possible.

And so, you know, some of those things we can accommodate very much natively given the, the 30 modules that I referenced, or 30 plus modules. But then we also have an amazing ecosystem of partnerships like the one with Rubrik that we'll talk about that, that furthers a lot of the gentech workflows that we're investing in. Uh, the ability to use agen AI in a platform to augment and analysts efforts across responding to incidents and stopping an attack or getting more context around a detection or even customizing AI agents to help, uh, make more efficient workflows or, you know, automate a lot of processes, you know, built into your incident response program.

So I think there's a lot that we can, that we've evolved into. Um, at the end of the day, we, you know, our goal is to always stop breaches, give you the highest fidelity of telemetry across your cloud workloads, your identities, your endpoints, and I think, I think we've truly pioneered kind of the, the new age of how transform your SOC and make it more efficient. Very cool.

Yeah. Phil, Philip, let me turn to you. Rubrik, maybe a little less well known than CrowdStrike, but nevertheless, kind of a, a stalwart in the security space.

But for those who are not totally familiar, how would you position it? Yeah, so our heritage, if you will, is definitely in the data space. So we've been doing this for, uh, just about 11 years now.

So we came up with a way to sort of greatly simplify and streamline, if you will, uh, data management for the enterprise, think about like backup and and recovery. Um, more recently we've expanded that, you know, into cyber resilience, which is sort of our focus today is security data and ai and sort of where these three fields overlap. That's sort of where we want to be the linchpin.

But cyber resilience specifically then, from what we are trying to do is, um, helping customers sort of withstand cyber threats and like if the worst happens, give them a part to bounce back as quickly as possible, um, to be operational, like making sure there's the least amount of downtime, because that's sort of when the counter of, you know, starting to lose money starts to, uh, starts to add up. So our goal is really how do we make sure that downtime for customer is as minimized as possible in, in the face of, uh, of cyber threats. And, uh, of course we're not doing that alone.

We're doing that with, uh, with great partners like, uh, like CrowdStrike, uh, but we are really focused on sort of the data lens, uh, there, if you will. Love it. Very good.

Um, so guys, now that we've got this out of the way, let's talk about why we got you both on the show today. Uh, both Rubrik CrowdStrike, you guys have announced a new partnership around identity, identity security, obviously. Phillip, if you don't mind, I'm gonna ask you to kick it off.

Tell us about the partnership, why, why our listeners should care, and anything else we need to know. Yeah, absolutely. So we've announced, uh, a new integration, which brings our integrations up to five at this point with CrowdStrike.

So we've had, uh, some integrations before, specifically around, uh, SIEM components and, and some of the so components as well. Um, so as mentioned before, we sort of bring that data lens, if you will, to the SOC operator. The idea really is if you think about, how do you know it, ops and SecOps come together to sort of work and make a customer more, more resilient.

We are making sure that we are providing that context from a rubric perspective in those existing sort of CrowdStrike, uh, let's say work streams. More specifically though the newer one, which is the very exciting one because it's the new one, but also because it's, uh, related to identity, which is sort of the hot topic of, uh, of the day, if you will, uh, in cyber. Uh, so we're working together on, on the identity piece where CrowdStrike is really sort of focused on like the prevention, detection, containment angle when it comes to identity security.

And we sort of now bring rollback capabilities to that as well. So one of the things that we could do is, let's say there's a detection on the CrowdStrike, uh, piece. We can take that and then we can add from our perspective, well, what has that, let's call a malicious user done before in the identity space.

Think about, for example, making changes through active directory and how can we roll those changes back. Uh, so let's say, you know, we've followed the malicious, potentially malicious account, malicious user made a number of, let's say 2030 different, uh, changes in in the identity provider space. How do we now take that and use rubric's capability for a rollback to go back to, let's say, a known clean state, uh, so the customer can operate in confidence again.

So we, we are sort of really making sure that we are bringing that context, but we're also not losing that signal that's coming from CrowdStrike while it's flowing to the IT operations side. Christian, what would you add to that? I think the partnership allows our customers to be very surgical, right?

Um, we have, we take pride in the ability to, uh, to stop attacks, especially at the identity level. We, we have a, an amazing report, really pa over the past two years, our global threat report has highlighted that identities are the number one attack surface, if you will, that adversaries are using. They're, they're not hacking in, they're logging in.

And so to give our customers the ability to understand things like anomalous behaviors across authentications, um, and to prevent that or actually create policy to enforce on it, I think is extremely important. But this second stage is, is, is is really game changing to say, now I can help with full system restore. Now I can be very precise with rollback of malicious identity changes as, as Philip mentioned, now we can ensure that business continuity, continuity is, is, is of utmost importance with respect to resiliency and resiliency strategies.

And so I think this is, this kind of helps finish that story to say we're not just, um, alerting naturally, we're enforcing, but now we can also fix, you know, any type of issues that we're seeing on the identity side. So, so this really completes the, the messaging for us. I, I believe so.

Look, I've always believed that identity security is the killer app for cloud security, right? Mm-hmm. Uh, you know, uh, I, I came up through security in the castle and mode era as, as the two of you did too, right?

We've all been in this 20, 25 years and that, you know, that's no longer where the battle is. That's not the battle front anymore. The battle front's out in the clout and, and identity is, is the key to that whole piece of it.

Because once that's compromised, you know, we still have that m and m kind of infrastructure. It's hard on the outside, but it's gooey in the inside once they pierce the identity veil boom. In most organizations, unfortunately, you got, you know, you got the run of the place and, and, and data's next.

Um, Philip Christian, where do you see this going? Right? This is a, you know, a a a great partnership.

What, what can we do? What, how do you build on this to make it even better? Philip, I'll let you go first.

Yeah, I think to sort of far back to what Christian mentioned in the beginning, like their vision of building this agent soc and like automating as much as possible, uh, that's something we've been, uh, trying to enable as well through the Rubik platform. So our entire platform is built on this API first architecture. So like, integrating with strong ecosystem vendors like CrowdStrike is extremely important for us.

Like, security is like not a one man game, right? You have to have strong partners with you to sort of cover all of the, um, so I think, you know, what they're building with Charlotte AI and some of the other capabilities in their platform, I think there's a lot of opportunity there for us still, uh, to, you know, build some of those next gen capabilities. We are really looking forward to, uh, to driving this a bit, uh, a bit more broadly as well, uh, really focused on the identity piece, uh, right now, but there's a lot more that, that we can do.

And we are also seeing that excitement in like our reseller base and our, our partner base in, in bringing this to market, uh, like Falcon, uh, in Las Vegas was a good example. Like, uh, if you looked at the excitement, uh, showing this capability, it was, uh, really amazing to see. So, uh, yeah, I think great opportunity ahead and, uh, looking forward to, uh, to, uh, building this out.

I, I agree, agree. Christian, I'll give you the last word here 'cause we're running low on time. Yeah, No, uh, it's all, all valid points.

Again, adversaries are getting fast. Um, we've been tracking things like breakout time for, uh, since 2016, and it's, you know, that that opportunity for lateral movement has, was starting out at roughly four hours back in the day, you know, back in, back in, back in the day, if you will. And now we're seeing it, uh, down to like an average of 48 minutes, and the fastest we've, we've seen is 51 seconds.

And so what this partnership does, and I love the, the agentic, um, component, Philip, by the way, but think of, think of like autonomous, like version control for identity, right? Where we spot something that's malicious or something that's suspicious, we like, like privilege escalation, we start to enforce, uh, and then Rubrik rolls back to those changes. And then creating an entire workflow that's orchestrated on behalf of the responder who is facing that 51 second, you know, fastest type of lateral movement or breakout, uh, time.

And so if that, if that number, as the episodes become faster and they're even leveraging AI and leveraging a variety of orchestration on their side to, to be efficient, this partnership with AI and ag agent models that we, that we're building out helps to ensure the defender can keep up with the pace of, of the adversary and ultimately prevent them from, from, you know, wreaking havoc in, in the environments that they're targeting. So faster response to identity based attacks is extremely important. No, no longer waiting or scrambling to rebuild systems.

The dispersing control capability with Rubrik is, is really gonna fuel in this new capability of, of response times that are, are important to, you know, the defenders that are looking to, you know, uh, increase MTTR, uh, or really decrease that and then also, um, ensure that the remediation efforts are, are, are met very swiftly, right. With, with a integration. That's, that's very powerful.

Fair enough guys, for people out here who maybe want to, uh, dig in a little deeper and get more information on this, I'm sure there's information up on, on both the rubric and, uh, CrowdStrike websites, right? Yeah. Probably just go to the front page and, and look search for it.

Or maybe just do a Google search on Rubrik CrowdStrike partner identity partnership. Yeah, absolutely. Would that be best?

Yeah. And, and join Falcon Europe. I would say come see it for life.

There You go. All right, now you open, you open that can of worms. When is Falcon in Europe?

Uh, early, early November in, uh, in Barcelona. So if you happen to be able to travel there, Barcelona's always fun and yeah, I'd love to share the latest, latest and greatest. Yes, it's, There You go.

We actually have a team in Barcelona right now, I think for the Atlassian event. It's in Barcelona. Um, kind of busy early November, but hey, that's a great reason to go to Barcelona.

Philip Christian, thank you both so much for coming on Tech Trunk tv. This is a great partnership. It's good to see two companies like this working together and, and bringing something valuable to market.

We'll be watching as it continues to evolve. Thank you. You got It.

Thank you. Thanks for Having us. All right.

We'll be back on text trunk TV here in just a moment. Until then, here's something new.