CrowdStrike (CRWD): Υπεράσπιση του Κυβερνοχώρου από το Σύννεφο

Η Σημασία των Κυβερνοαμυντικών

As more and more activities move to the digital realm, the more risks they entail as well. This is true not only in terms of increased competition or changing business strategies, but also in terms of actual security risks.

Για παράδειγμα, η κλοπή, η οποία παλαιότερα απαιτούσε φυσική παρουσία για την κλοπή περιουσιακών στοιχείων μιας εταιρείας, μπορεί τώρα να γίνει απομακρυσμένα και σχεδόν αόρατα από τους κυβερνοεγκληματίες. Η εκβίαση μπορεί επίσης τώρα να πάρει τη μορφή κράτησης ομήρου όχι των υπαλλήλων ή των περιουσιακών στοιχείων μιας εταιρείας, αλλά με την απειλή καταστροφής ή δημοσίευσης εμπιστευτικών δεδομένων, ή με το μπλοκάρισμα των λειτουργιών της εταιρείας μέχρι να ικανοποιηθούν οι απαιτήσεις των εγκληματιών.

Ως αποτέλεσμα, η κυβερνοασφάλεια είναι ένας άνθιστος τομέας, με ακόμη μεγαλύτερη ανάπτυξη να προβλέπεται στο μέλλον. Είναι αυτή τη στιγμή μια αγορά αξίας 245 δισεκατομμυρίων δολαρίων, με προβλεπόμενη ετήσια αύξηση 12,9 % CAGR μέχρι το 2030.

Πηγή: Grand View Research

Η ανάπτυξη του τομέα της κυβερνοασφάλειας κινείται κυρίως από την υιοθέτηση νέων τεχνολογιών, ειδικά λογισμικών ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) και CRM (Customer Relationship Management) για την B2B κυβερνοασφάλεια και τις υπηρεσίες στο σύννεφο, μαζί με την αυξημένη συχνότητα και σοβαρότητα των κυβερνοεπιθέσεων.

Πηγή: Statista

Καθώς περισσότερα δεδομένα βρίσκονται στο σύννεφο, είναι λογικό να μετακινούνται και οι λύσεις κυβερνοασφάλειας εκεί. Μία εταιρεία ήταν μπροστά σε αυτή τη στρατηγική κίνηση: CrowdStrike.

CrowdStrike: Ηγέτης στην Ασφάλεια του Σύννεφου

CrowdStrike was founded with a cloud-first approach to cybersecurity, with a strong focus on B2B (business-to-business) markets.

It was founded in 2012, with only $26M in initial funding. It started to release its global threat report in 2018, now an industry-leading information source. It became a publicly traded company in 2019 and started a series of acquisitions, together with module launches, to create a complete end-to-end cybersecurity solution.

Η πρώιμη μετάβαση της CrowdStrike στο σύννεφο της επέτρεψε να είναι μπροστά όταν ήρθε η ώρα να προστατεύσει αυτό το είδος δεδομένων, και αποδείχθηκε σημαντικό ανταγωνιστικό πλεονέκτημα καθώς όλο και περισσότερες εταιρείες μετακινούνται από αυτοπροστατευμένους, εντός-τοπο servers σε cloud servers.

Η εταιρεία μπορεί να παρέχει ασφάλεια σε όλα τα επίπεδα του οργανισμού, από μεμονωμένες συσκευές μέχρι ολόκληρη την υποδομή IT μιας εταιρείας.

Πηγή: CrowdStrike

The company counts among its clients most of the world’s largest organizations, notably:

• 18 of the 20 largest US banks.
• 44 out of 50 US States.
• >70% of the Fortune 100 companies.

Πηγή: CrowdStrike

This makes CrowdStrike the world’s largest independent software vendor securing Windows systems, with the company working hand-in-hand with Microsoft (MSFT ).

Το Ενσωματωμένο Μοντέλο Κυβερνοασφάλειας της CrowdStrike

Πώς η CrowdStrike Ενσωματώνει Εργαλεία Κυβερνοασφάλειας

A key point of Crowdstrike’s offer is that it brings together in a cloud environment what was before an extremely fragmented landscape of security solutions that needed to be integrated with each other.

Για παράδειγμα, η πληροφορία απειλών, η πληροφορία για ιούς και άλλες ψηφιακές απειλές όπως συγκεκριμένες ομάδες χάκερ και μολυσμένα συστήματα, χρησιμοποιούνταν τότε από λογισμικό όπως το McAfee ή το Symantec για προστασία δεδομένων.

Ή το SIEM (Security Information and Event Management), η συγκέντρωση δεδομένων ασφαλείας σε έναν οργανισμό, χρειάζεται να οργανωθεί με επαλήθευση ταυτότητας και ασφάλεια άκρων (προστασία συσκευών).

Πηγή: CrowdStrike

Το Μοντέλο Συνδρομητικών Εσόδων της CrowdStrike

Because Cybersecurity is something that needs to be deeply integrated into a company’s operations, the choice of a cybersecurity provider is a long-term one.

This results in CrowdStrike’s revenues being highly predictable, with 98% gross retention of its user accounts. CrowdStrike’s Annual recurring revenue (ARR) where $3.9B in Q2 2025, with a target of $10B fixed by the company for 2031.

Πηγή: CrowdStrike

Another aspect of CrowdStrike is that the product is highly modular. Some companies might not need all the possible cybersecurity tools, or lack the ability to implement them yet. Others might only want to test some functions before deciding to replace their existing solutions entirely.

In all these cases, the client can choose to pick only a few modules of the whole platform.

On average, 7 modules are used per customer (for customers with $100K+ ending ARR). In total, 67% of users use 5 modules or more, and 21% use 8 modules or more. Generally, the older a customer, the more cybersecurity modules from CrowdStrike it adds to its systems.

Καινοτομίες της CrowdStrike στην Ασφάλεια SIEM

Security Information and Event Management, or SIEM, has been the initial core of cybersecurity strategy.

It is the activity of gathering and identifying all the potential weak points, concerned devices, their connections to each other, and the overall architecture of an organization’s digital systems, and their implications for cybersecurity.

It was also the least innovative and reactive segment of the industry, with a severe lack of innovation from incumbents.

CrowdStrike has worked to change that with a few key changes:

• Platform consolidation allows for smooth integration with other cybersecurity tools.
• A threat-first approach moving away from the outdated existing-infrastructure-first approach.
• Easy data imports.

Πηγή: CrowdStrike

Πώς η CrowdStrike Δημιουργεί Νέες Αγορές Κυβερνοχώρου

Following its initial lead in cloud-based cybersecurity, the company has made somewhat of a habit to create new markets in the industry in response to evolving cyber-threats.

For example, it created the identity protection segment and recently grew it from $200M in revenue in Q2 2024 to $350M a year later, or a 70% growth year-to-year (4,000+ customers).

This allows for much more secured login and identification of users into an IT system, a growing requirement as more and more employees are working remotely or needing access to sensitive data.

Πηγή: CrowdStrike

The same happened for cloud security, which is still growing extremely quickly, with a 80% year-to-year growth, reaching $515M revenues and >10,000 customers in Q2 2025.

And as the threats become more and more complex, the level of integration and innovation CrowdStrike display has been a winning proposition with increasingly anxious corporations regarding cyberthreats that are beyond their core competences. And that was before the ongoing generalization of AI capacities.

Πηγή: CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike και Η Κυβερνοασφάλεια με Τεχνητή Νοημοσύνη

As AIs’ capacities are exploding, this is both to the benefit and to the detriment of cybersecurity.

On one hand, this is a very powerful tool given to hacker and cyber criminals. For example, LLMs (Large Language Models) can now be used to try to pry out of unsuspecting employees passwords, confidential data, or create other vulnerabilities without human intervention at all.

For example, “vishing”, or voice phishing, is now using AIs to generate credible voice requests for sensitive information, like login credentials, credit card numbers, or bank details.

On the other hand, companies like CrowdStrike can now deploy AI systems to monitor safety in real time and at a scale not previously possible. For example the company recently released Charlotte AI, a generative AI for cybersecurity. This is an AI agent helping triage security alarms, remove false positives and has already stopped billions of security breaches.

Πηγή: CrowdStrike

“Η AI επίσης βοηθά στην προτεραιοποίηση των ειδοποιήσεων που είναι πιθανό να είναι επείγουσες. Οι αναλυτές μας στη συνέχεια αφιερώνουν τον χρόνο τους στα ζητήματα υψηλότερου κινδύνου αντί να σαρώνουν τον θόρυβο.”

David Levin – CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) at American Express

AI can also make the integration of CrowdStrike to legacy cybersecurity tools and IT systems a lot easier, with adding data to CrowdStrike cloud tools almost seamless.

Πηγή: CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike was also integrated in Μάιος 2025 by NVIDIA (NVDA ) into its Enterprise AI Factory validated design

“Η CrowdStrike πρωτοπόρησε στην AI-native κυβερνοασφάλεια, και σήμερα εξασφαλίζουμε την τυποποιημένη αρχιτεκτονική που μετασχηματίζει τον τρόπο που οι οργανισμοί καινοτομούν στην εποχή της AI.

Μαζί με τη NVIDIA, εξαλείφουμε τις εικασίες από την ασφάλεια της AI υποδομής με μια επικυρωμένη αναφορά αρχιτεκτονικής.”

Daniel Bernard – Chief Business Officer at CrowdStrike.

Overall, CrowdStrike sees AI-native cybersecurity platforms as a $116B total addressable market, with most of the industry still extremely fragmented and sub-scale for development of AI tools and data integration at the capacity CrowdStrike can deploy.

Πιο Ευέλικτες Και Προσβάσιμες Προσφορές

Falcon Flex

While being at the top of technical capacity is certainly important in a field as complex and quickly changing as cybersecurity, commercial offer can also have a huge impact on a company’s success.

A recurring issue for potential users of CrowdStrike was that they are not always sure of their present cybersecurity needs, and even less of future needs. As a result, a tendency to play it safe and stick to already implemented solutions, or to reluctantly expand subscriptions and modules have been common.

This is why CrowdStrike introduced Flacon Flex, a new licensing model for its flagship Flacon platform, with much less stringent and rigid subscription conditions:

• The subscription is now flexible, with a duration that can be changed from 1-5 years costlessly.
• The actual subscription costs can fluctuate depending on platform demand and usage.
• Modules can be swapped, making the costs of tentatively adopting a new module for a test a lot less daunting and expensive.

This has been a very successful offer, and since launch it has grown extremely quickly to represent a significant portion of CrowdStrike customers. In Q4 2024 these customers were “only” a $185M in total account value, which already grew to >$700M by Q2 2025.

Πηγή: CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike Financing

Another issue for CrowdStrike customers, especially smaller companies, is that cybersecurity needs might occur when the company least expects it.

If this coincides with a severe crisis caused by security failure, it can be difficult to mobilize the financial resources to deploy expensive cybersecurity tools, even if they are now understood as direly needed. This is why CrowdStrike has started offering advantageous financing services to its existing and onboarding clients.

For the customer, the benefit is getting access to adequate protection without the constraints of the cash on hand available.

For CrowdStrike, this is the occasion to sign larger, multi-year deals, close the new deals or new module sales quickly, and build a stronger relationship with its users.

This service has only been provided to US customers so far, and so could likely be beneficial when expanded to customers globally. As it converts in generally larger deals, it is mostly cash neutral for the company.

Οικονομική Απόδοση της CrowdStrike

From a financial point of view, CrowdStrike is remarkably profitable. It has registered 81% non-GAAP subscription gross margins, and grew its annual recurring revenues by 32% year-to-year.

Meanwhile, the free cash flow grew 44% year-to-year to reach $272M in Q2 2025.

The deals with large uses of the platform, with 8+ modules, are also becoming very frequent, with a growth of 66% year-to-year of such deals.

Πηγή: CrowdStrike

As the above 95% retention rate persists, this growth in new clients should convert into very stable revenue streams for the years to come.

Ανάλυση της Διακοπής Λειτουργίας του 2024 της CrowdStrike

Not all has been rosy for CrowdStrike’s uninterrupted growth. Unfortunately, the first time the company name became very well known beyond IT and investing professionals was during a massive IT outage linked to the company.

On July 19th, 2024, a botched software update from CrowdStrike caused around 8.5 million Windows computers to crash with dreaded blue screens, in what has been described as “maybe the largest IT outage in history”.

This affected many infrastructures, including hospitals, emergency services, airports, airlines, retail shops, broadcasting, government agencies, factories, etc.

What happened is that the update in the Falcon platform caused a crash in the software. But as Falcon is integrated pretty deep inside Windows, this caused the rest of the operating system to crash as well.

So this was not a cyber attack, nor a malicious event of any sort. But it was certainly a major blunder. Something the company is today referring to as (somewhat ominously)  “the incident”.

Since then, CrowdStrike has changed its content update procedures to prevent similar incidents in the future. New updates will be rolled out slowly and not everywhere at once, and customers can now choose to pick if they are early adopters of these updates, delay, or even opt out entirely.

In addition, 3^rd party input, review and validation has now been implemented, in order to avoid this event to ever repeat again.

This nevertheless illustrated the issue of centralized and shared software between so many critical systems, especially one with high-level authorization and deep into the OS, like a cybersecurity concept. This concept is central to CrowdStrike’s business model, as well as to most of its competitors today operating in cloud cybersecurity.

The generation of new leads and clients in the sales pipeline is apparently returning to “pre-incident levels.” Overall, this has not affected the service’s popularity, even if it has certainly made many customers more likely to delay updating their systems.

Το Μέλλον της CrowdStrike στην Κυβερνοασφάλεια

The transition to the cloud is still mostly ongoing for many large companies. This creates a large opportunity for a market leader like CrowdStrike to help them transition their cybersecurity strategy to the cloud as well.

The cloud-first approach of CrowdStrike has allowed it to take market share quickly and is now replicated by all the large cybersecurity companies. So, investors will want to pay attention to CrowdStrike’s ability to retain its advantage despite mounting counterattacks by the industry to catch up with the first mover.

The company should also see its international business grow, with still 3/4th of the Global 2000 companies yet to enter the CrowdStrike ecosystem. The arrival of AI as a massive accelerator for cloud adoption, IT migration, as well as a growth in threats should be an extra booster to CrowdStrike growth. And an extra tool to leverage for the company to do its job even better.

The 2024 IT outage illustrates the possibility of such centralization and ultra-fast connectivity to cause trouble as well. It is likely a sign of maturation of the industry that now, such an update will only be rolled back progressively and much more safely, limiting any failure to a much smaller and less publicized scale.

Still, “the event” does not seem to have hurt the company’s momentum, and the stock price has already rebounded almost to its all-time-high levels, demonstrating it. So as long as the world uses computers more and more, and as long as CrowdStrike can stay at the top of innovation in the cybersecurity space, investors will likely do well with the company.

(Μπορείτε επίσης να διαβάσετε περισσότερα για τον τομέα της κυβερνοασφάλειας στο άρθρο μας “Top 10 Cybersecurity Stocks for Digital Protection”.)

Τελευταία CrowdStrike (CRWD) Νέα Μετοχής και Αναπτύξεις