How Zscaler-Red Canary Deal Is Boosting CrowdStrike Partnership: Execs

The acquisition is strengthening the collaboration between the two cybersecurity giants across both technical and go-to-market efforts, executives from CrowdStrike, Zscaler and Red Canary tell CRN.

Zscaler’s recent acquisition of Red Canary is delivering massive benefits to its pivotal partnership with CrowdStrike, creating major opportunities for joint channel partners of the two cybersecurity giants, executives from the companies told CRN.

The partnership expansion has been prompted by Zscaler’s acquisition of well-known MDR (managed detection and response) vendor Red Canary, a $675 million deal that was completed Aug. 1.

Just weeks after the acquisition closed, Zscaler and CrowdStrike announced an expansion of their partnership centered around security operations (SecOps) and MDR.

Ultimately, the acquisition is strengthening the collaboration between the cybersecurity vendors across both technical and go-to-market efforts, executives from CrowdStrike, Zscaler and Red Canary said in an interview with CRN.

What follows are five things to know about how the Zscaler-Red Canary deal is boosting its partnership with CrowdStrike.

Long-Running Partners

CrowdStrike and Zscaler have worked together closely for years, executives said, finding much that was complementary between their respective product portfolios.

“CrowdStrike and Zscaler, I think, pioneered what's become the industry's most successful partnership,” said Daniel Bernard, chief business officer at CrowdStrike.

Through “unifying” the products offered by each company, the partnership has had the impact of “making zero trust a reality for every single joint customer,” Bernard said. “This is a partnership that has produced thousands and thousands of happy customers that use a plethora of integrations.”

Crucially, the “extremely strong partnership” between the two companies has been driving significant growth “with and through our joint partners,” said Melissa Nacerino, vice president for global partner marketing at Zscaler. “That's where we are seeing that that magic happen — where we're really triangulating, from the technical perspective to the partnership perspective, at our level between Zscaler and CrowdStrike.”

Focus On Modernization

With the acquisition of Red Canary now completed, a major focus for the Zscaler-CrowdStrike collaboration going forward is around modernizing security tooling for partners and customers, executives said.

The vast numbers of legacy endpoint tools that are still in use means that “now there's a concerted focus by everybody here of not only bringing all the great technology that Zscaler has to bear to these customers, but also fortifying them with the Falcon platform as well,” Bernard said. “And so it's a big win-win for everyone.”

CrowdStrike, Zscaler and Red Canary are thus collaborating to "modernize them to the stack they need to actually fulfill the mission of stopping the breach,” he said.

Best-Of-Breed Platforms

Amid many converging factors that have impacted cyber defense within organizations, “many security teams are looking to converge onto these best-of-breed platforms,” said Brian Beyer, co-founder and CEO of Red Canary. “We feel the same way. I'd much rather have my customers have a small number of best-of-breed platforms, like Zscaler and CrowdStrike, rather than having a bunch of different point products that they're trying to mix together.”

As a technology vendor partner, CrowdStrike has always been a “very engineering-oriented partner — so that there have always been deep APIs, deep cloud-to-cloud connections between our platform and theirs,” Beyer said. “And that's been a unique differentiator of their platform that gives customers more flexibility and more power compared to many of their competitors.”

Without a doubt, many security vendors purporting to offer a unified platform actually just have a “billing model, or multiple platforms that claim they're a singular thing on a PowerPoint slide,” Bernard said. “But for the end user, it ends up being dashboard after dashboard, console after console, agent after agent. And the same threat shows up in five different places as five different [incidents].”

In order to truly see the benefit of consolidation and to successfully stop a breach, “you need this cross-domain view of what's going on in your organization,” Bernard said. “This partnership and the [expansion] announcement highlights a consolidation that we're making together in a unified fashion for these customers — migrating them from legacy point products [that are] failing to the industry leader across everything that we all do together.”

Agentic And AI-Powered Security

The expanded partnership is also doubling down on improving security outcomes through agentic and AI-powered capabilities, meanwhile, executives said.

For instance, Red Canary has been heavily investing in training its AI agents through data produced from detections of incidents and responses to those incidents with customers, Beyer said.

“We talk a lot between our engineering teams about the future of when the Red Canary agents will then be talking to the Falcon agents and collaborating on, how do we get the right information and pull it all together?” he said. “It's the same thing we're doing throughout the Zscaler product suite in integrating our platform with theirs. And so that's something that we know makes a big difference to customers, because they want to find those threats faster and with a very high accuracy rate.”

Ultimately, “this data — and the ability to more deeply integrate the Red Canary platform with the Zscaler platform and the Falcon platform — makes a huge difference in getting more of that data faster,” Beyer said.

Channel Partner Opportunities

For channel partners such as VARs, MSPs and system integrators, a key opportunity in the expanded Zscaler-CrowdStrike partnership is to begin offering a wider set of services, executives said.

“We share so many joint partners within our global partner ecosystem — and for them, this is really delivering such a tremendous opportunity,” Nacerino said. “They are seeing the full landscape, the full architecture. And for them to go in and to be able to address these customer needs holistically with the integrated solution, is where we are seeing such tremendous success with our partners.”

Overall, with the expanded Zscaler-CrowdStrike partnership in the wake of the Red Canary acquisition, “we're extremely bullish on the opportunity that we will be bringing to our partners as we extend this partnership with and through Red Canary,” she said.