US based CrowdStrike, a provider of cloud-based endpoint protection, threat intelligence and response services, has launched operations in Asia Pacific by opening an office in Australia and announcing Telstra as a customer.
The move follows a $US100 million Series C funding led by Google Capital in 2015. Other existing investors included Warburg Pincus, Accel and Rackspace.
The company has named Mike Sentonas vice president of technology strategy 'to spearhead CrowdStrike's APAC go-to-market efforts and oversee the company's growing customer and partner network.' He was most recently chief technology and strategy officer Asia Pacific at Intel Security and prior to that vice president and worldwide chief technology officer of Security Connected at Intel Security. He will report to CrowdStrike co-founder and chief technology officer Dmitri Alperovitch.
The company has also appointed Simon Walker as senior director of marketing, APAC. He was previously director of marketing, APAC at Forcepoint.
George Kurtz, CrowdStrike's co-founder and CEO, said: 'CrowdStrike is seeing significant growth in APAC, and Australia in particular is an extremely important market for us. In addition to our strong global customer portfolio, we have also witnessed rapidly growing demand for our industry-leading next-generation endpoint protection platform.'
He claimed that CrowdStrike was 'the only company that has successfully unified next-generation antivirus and endpoint detection and response (EDR) through a fully cloud-based, API-driven platform, which allows customers unrivalled capabilities to stop existing and emerging threats.'
Telstra's chief information security officer, Mike Burgess, said: 'The CrowdStrike technology is providing a unique value to Telstra in its ability to detect and stop zero day exploits, malware attacks, along with hacker activity and ransomware, all of which go undetected by legacy security technologies. Telstra relies on CrowdStrike's combination of technology, people and intelligence to protect against the most sophisticated threats and help keep our customers' data safe and networks secure.'
He added: 'CrowdStrike Falcon's next-generation threat prevention capabilities, its DVR-like endpoint detection and response features, aided by the elite Falcon Overwatch managed hunting team, has proved its value to us time and again.'
