The findings of a commissioned Forrester Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study, conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of CrowdStrike, reveal the measurable benefits of unifying cloud security posture management and runtime protection on a single platform that secures cloud workloads and AI infrastructure at the point of execution.

Forrester analyzed a composite organization representative of interviewed customers that deployed CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security. Its study is based on the real experiences of security leaders operating large, complex cloud environments.

The results show clear financial and operational value: Falcon Cloud Security delivered a 264% return on investment over three years, with payback starting in less than six months by providing runtime controls that prevent or rapidly contain active threats, along with unified visibility across multicloud assets; real-time, cross-domain context; and AI-assisted triage. The total quantified benefits totaled $13.8 million USD. 

Greater Insight Accelerates Detection and Response 

Organizations used Falcon Cloud Security to improve runtime behavioral visibility, reduce noise, and centralize cloud and workload telemetry into a single investigative plane. By bringing workload, identity, and endpoint signals into one workflow, interviewees could correlate data across domains to quickly isolate threats. This accelerated cloud threat detection and response, and expanded their overall SOC capacity. With higher-confidence behavioral analytics and fewer false positives, analysts spent less time triaging alerts and more time on real threats.

Mean time to detect improved by 20-30%, and mean time to respond improved by roughly 30%, supported by stronger behavioral analytics and reduced alert noise. Organizations reported sustained reductions in incident response labor and said their teams could identify issues earlier, isolate them faster, and close investigations with less effort.

An information security leader at a telecommunications company explained how their organization was able to gather more high-quality context in less time:  

“[Before CrowdStrike], I would have to either go to the account owner or try to get access and pull the configs directly from a one-off standpoint and try to answer those questions … We get more insight now for our security analysts around activity that occurs, as well as the configuration of the assets that those activities occur on. It’s definitely more efficient because that’s a lot of time saved for the analysts.”

These efficiency gains in accelerated cloud detection and response delivered $5.9 million USD in risk-adjusted value — the largest quantified benefit in the study.

45% Improvement in Cloud Security

Before adopting Falcon Cloud Security, interviewed customers reported escalating cloud risk driven by rapid scaling, misconfigurations, and noisy decentralized environments that obscured visibility into assets, configurations, and runtime activity. Fragmented tooling and manual processes led to high false positives and missed alerts. A high volume of findings, without context, made it tough to determine which risks needed action.

These organizations sought to improve their cloud security programs to keep up with the pace of cloud adoption and the growing pressure of cloud-focused threats. Their goals reflected a need to reduce cost and risk, streamline investigation and remediation, and unify their cloud security initiatives under a scalable model.

They adopted Falcon Cloud Security, which drove a 45% improvement in cloud security due to better visibility and detection of cloud runtime threats. Beyond stronger security outcomes, this improvement translated to nearly $2 million USD in risk-adjusted value over three years.

A Single Hub to Identify and Prioritize High-risk Misconfigurations 

Interviewees discussed how Falcon Cloud Security reduced the number of products needed to identify and fix misconfigurations, as it gave developers a single source for cloud asset configuration, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, exposure paths, and compliance.

With access to unified posture insights and runtime controls, including for Kubernetes and containers, developers could quickly identify which assets were exposed without sorting through noise. Automated detection triage and AI-driven prioritization helped reduce false positives and limited full escalations, so developers could shift their focus from triaging alerts to resolving critical problems.

An IT product and compliance manager at a smart manufacturing company shared:

“[With CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security], data accuracy and data precision are higher, which means you need to invest [less] time in monitoring and investigating. The availability of that data is faster because you can go through the [platform], while previously, you had to go into [several] different tools, so you also save time there. And third, you have [visibility from] a user point of view on a global scale.”

With AI-driven prioritization and unified visibility across cloud assets, containers, and CI/CD pipelines, teams were able to achieve a 30% reduction in time to identify and prioritize high-risk vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. These improvements translated to nearly $4.5 million USD in productivity gains.

$1.4M Saved by Reducing Multicloud Security Costs

Organizations in the study consolidated their multicloud security stack and brought signals, context, and workflows into a single experience. This allowed teams to eliminate redundant tools and capabilities, implement automated workflows, and simplify compliance, posture management, and remediation in a single interface.

By reducing complexity and unifying operations, organizations improved efficiency across security and development teams, resulting in a 12% reduction in multicloud security technology costs. In total, these consolidation and efficiency gains delivered $1.4 million USD in cost savings over three years.

As one security leader shared:

“We replaced several redundant technologies for $1.1 million per year in savings. This equates to about 5% of the overall security budget.”

The Advantage of Unified Cloud Security

The organizations in this study fundamentally changed how their teams operate. Instead of chasing low-priority findings and navigating disconnected tools, they built a model where visibility, context, and response are unified from the start.

This shift is critical in today’s threat landscape. Adversaries move across identity, endpoint, and cloud in minutes, often exploiting the gaps that exist between technologies. Most security operations are still fragmented, making it difficult to detect and stop these attacks in time.

Organizations that are well-positioned to stop today’s adversaries focus on accelerated cloud detection and response, prioritize risk based on real-world exposure, investigate threats with full context, reduce noise, and unify workflows across security and development teams.

CrowdStrike believes the Forrester TEI study validates this approach by demonstrating improved security, faster operations, and measurable ROI. The full study breaks down the exact ROI model, cost savings, and financial impact across security, operations, and development teams. Download the full study to see how these results apply to your organization and request a Falcon Cloud Security demo to see unified cloud protection in action.

Additional Resources

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Complexity has become a defining security challenge as organizations expand across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. In fact, 52% of surveyed organizations ranked multi/hybrid cloud complexity among their top three infrastructure concerns.¹ This complexity creates fragmented visibility across cloud providers, workloads, and Kubernetes environments — gaps that adversaries increasingly exploit to move undetected.

Cloud-conscious intrusions rose 37% year-over-year in 2025, the CrowdStrike 2026 Global Threat Report found. Emerging eCrime adversaries are advancing their tactics to abuse trusted relationships and compromise downstream victims. Adversaries are also accelerating — the fastest observed eCrime breakout time was just 27 seconds — leaving little room for delayed detection and response.

Yet with the tooling available today, this remains difficult in practice. Three key gaps persist:

• Fragmented runtime visibility: Limited or siloed visibility across multi-cloud environments slows investigation and obscures attacker activity.
• Delayed detection and response: Reliance on log post-processing introduces lag, giving adversaries time to move laterally and establish persistence.
• Kubernetes control plane blind spots: Limited visibility into the Kubernetes API layer allows attackers to abuse legitimate actions to escalate privileges and modify configurations without triggering traditional defenses.

Closing these gaps requires a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) approach that extends beyond posture management to deliver real-time, unified detection and response across cloud environments.

Today, we’re introducing expanded real-time cloud detection and response (CDR) support for Google Cloud, along with new Kubernetes threat detections for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). These innovations are designed to close critical visibility gaps and enable faster detection and response to modern cloud threats.

We’re also extending the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform to regional Google Cloud infrastructure, enabling organizations to adopt and consolidate on the industry’s leading AI-native cybersecurity platform using the underlying cloud provider that best aligns to their operational and data sovereignty requirements. 

With these new innovations, CrowdStrike continues to advance its mission of helping organizations stop cloud breaches across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Real-Time CDR for Google Cloud: Expanding Detection and Response Across Multi-Cloud Environments

CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security now extends real-time CDR to Google Cloud, in addition to support for AWS, delivering unified, real-time detection and response across multi-cloud environments. By bringing Google Cloud activity into a single detection pipeline, security teams gain visibility into attacker behavior across their multi-cloud attack surface and eliminate the gaps of fragmented visibility that adversaries leverage.

Many approaches to processing agentless cloud telemetry introduce delays in detection. Falcon Cloud Security analyzes Google Cloud activity as it happens and instantly applies detections. This enables SOC teams to identify malicious cloud activity in seconds and interrupt attacker activity before it can progress, reducing dwell time and limiting potential blast radius. 

CrowdStrike powers CDR with the breadth of the broader Falcon platform, in which teams can correlate cloud telemetry with sensor activity and threat intelligence, and accelerate with CrowdStrike® Charlotte AI™ for deeper threat hunting and faster investigations.

With multi-cloud support, CrowdStrike continues to lead as the only CNAPP delivering real-time, cross-cloud detection and response designed to stop breaches.

Watch it in action in this demo:

This new capability is in beta and will be generally available in the coming months.

Kubernetes Threat Detection: Exposing Attacker Activity in the Control Plane

As organizations increasingly rely on Kubernetes to run mission-critical and AI-driven applications, visibility into the control plane has become essential to stopping modern attacks. Without it, adversaries can operate through legitimate orchestration workflows and bypass traditional runtime defenses to remain undetected.

Falcon Cloud Security now extends detection coverage into the Kubernetes control plane to provide visibility into attacker activity within the orchestration layer that manages and deploys workloads. While the Falcon sensor protects the runtime environment, Kubernetes threat detection enhances coverage by ingesting and monitoring Kubernetes audit logs to expose how adversaries exploit resources — such as service accounts or secrets — to gain access, escalate privileges, and maintain persistence beyond the workload.

Each detection is enriched with cloud, workload, and identity context and correlated across the Falcon platform so security teams can trace attacker activity across Kubernetes and the broader cloud environment. This allows teams to connect control plane actions with runtime behavior and identity activity, and gain a unified view of how attacks unfold across domains.

By extending detection into the control plane, Falcon Cloud Security provides comprehensive Kubernetes protection that helps organizations detect and stop attacks that would otherwise remain hidden.

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