CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs Illumio comparison

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security is a platform of cloud security solutions aimed at protecting organizations from breaches while simplifying cloud security management. The unified platform combines several cloud security functionalities for comprehensive protection. Built on the CrowdStrike Falcon Platform, it leverages the powerful agent and technology used in CrowdStrike's renowned endpoint protection solutions, extending its capabilities seamlessly to cloud environments.

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security is designed to be a shield for the cloud infrastructure. One of its key strengths is its ability to monitor cloud workloads for potential breaches and attacks. It doesn't matter if you're running virtual machines, containers, or a combination of both across different cloud providers – Falcon Cloud Security offers visibility and protection. Additionally, it works tirelessly to pinpoint misconfigurations or vulnerabilities in your cloud setup, proactively stopping issues before they become full-blown security incidents. Compliance becomes easier too, as it can check if your deployments meet the requirements of various industry standards and regulations.

If you heavily utilize containers and Kubernetes, Falcon Cloud Security has you covered. It delves deep into container images and running containers to spot weaknesses and potential threats, helping you secure your containerized applications from the moment they're developed to when they're up and running. Finally, it tackles the often messy world of permissions in the cloud. Falcon Cloud Security analyzes identities and their attached permissions, ensuring that the principle of least privilege is followed and sensitive data isn't exposed due to overly broad access rights.

In essence, CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security aims to simplify the complexities of cloud security by consolidating tools, providing a centralized view of your risks and threats, and delivering advanced protection that blends seamlessly with your development processes.

Based on the interviews we conducted with CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security users, overall, the sentiment is positive. Users praise the solution's efficacy in detecting and preventing threats, its ease of use, scalability, stability, and integration with existing systems. There were also mentions of areas for improvement, such as the pricing, the user interface, and customer support.

Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation is a cloud and data center security solution that helps stop breaches from spreading across hybrid and multi cloud IT environments. The solution is designed to stop ransomware, contain cyber attacks, and reduce risk. With Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation, users can understand relationships and communications to map exposure risk of systems and data, identify the right security posture and secure applications through least-privilege policies, and ensure a Zero Trust security posture.

Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation Features

Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Scalability: Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation scales up to 200,000 managed workloads or over 700,000 unmanaged workloads. These workloads can be in the cloud, on-premises, and in hybrid environments.

• Single pane of visibility: The solution’s single pane of visibility improves your security posture and ability to prevent and respond rapidly to cyberattacks.

• Simplicity: With Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation, setting up groups and tags is simple. The solution is easy to integrate with next-generation firewalls and can also integrate with IT service management tools to import workload tags to provide more context to workloads.

• Ransomware containment: The solution provides enforcement boundaries to contain attackers from moving laterally across your organization, enabling security architects to immediately isolate any workload or endpoint compromised in an attack. Enforcement boundaries can be activated instantly through scripts or by manual control, isolating workloads and endpoints already infected from spreading across the organization.

Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Visibility everywhere: The Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation solution helps ensure that every interaction on your network is accounted for. 

• Least-privilege access: By implementing Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation, your organization can prevent unexpected breaches from propagating.

• Adaptability and consistency: The solution guarantees consistent network behavior everywhere. 

• Proactive posture: Using the solution enables your organization to always be on the lookout for an attack. 

• Improve breach containment: With the solution, you can prevent unauthorized lateral movement and reduce your blast radius. Creating micro-perimeters around specific assets breaks up your attack surface and gives you the granular control needed to contain breaches.

• Streamline policy management: The solution enables organizations to decouple segmentation from the underlying network to define policies based on the language that IT uses. Illumio's human-readable labels make policy creation much simpler and faster than traditional network segmentation approaches like VLANs, IP addresses, and port numbers.

Reviews from Real Users

Illumio Zero Trust Segmentation is a solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Some of its major advantages are that it has a good auto policy writing feature, great mapping, and useful monitoring. 

Shashi, Technical Consultant at a financial services firm, explains which features she really likes. “The auto policy writing is great. The feature will give you the option of inbound-outbound traffic. The Explorer allows you to know the traffic between source and destination. The illumination definitely stands out. Mapping is great. The application group mapping is useful.”

The solution has “helpful support, useful monitoring, and high availability,” according to Edwin L., Security Architect at MGM.