Partners: CrowdStrike Will Recover Its Reputation After Historic Outage

While it may take time, CrowdStrike is likely to restore the confidence of customers, solution providers tell CRN.

It won’t happen overnight, but CrowdStrike is ultimately poised to recover from the reputational damage wrought since the massive July 19 outage, solution provider executives told CRN.

CrowdStrike’s acclaimed cybersecurity technology and strong response to the incident suggest the company will be able to restore its reputation over time, the CrowdStrike partners said.

[Related: The CrowdStrike-Microsoft Outage Is Likely To Curtail Auto-Updates. That May Not Be A Good Thing.]

More than 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices were hobbled by CrowdStrike’s defective update early last Friday, leading to widespread disruptions to air travel, business and health care that continued into this week.

While CrowdStrike has clearly lost momentum and market value, “I think they will bounce back,” said Kiran Bhujle, managing director at SVAM International, a CrowdStrike partner based in Great Neck, N.Y. “I’m very confident.”

Crucially, it appears that most CrowdStrike customers will give the vendor another chance, according to Kin Mitra, president and CEO of Mission Critical Systems, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based CrowdStrike partner.

“I haven’t had a customer say, ‘Hey, we’re going to rip and replace CrowdStrike.’ That hasn’t happened,” Mitra said.

Ultimately, “they still have really, really good technology, and they kind of dominate the market,” Mitra said. “Will they recover and go on to do bigger things? Yes, absolutely.”

Solution provider partners also told CRN that CrowdStrike has shown a willingness to do what it takes to help customers recover quickly.

CrowdStrike has continually shown over the past week that “they want to take ownership and responsibility of it,” said Heath Renfrow, co-founder of Fenix24, a CrowdStrike partner based in Chattanooga, Tenn.

The impacts from the outage are of course “devastating,” Renfrow said. But the reality is that “mistakes happen,” he added.

Experts have said that CrowdStrike’s global scale amplified the effects of the company’s failure to catch a defective sensor update—but it’s likely that such incidents have happened before but went unnoticed due to the vendors operating on a much smaller scale.

The bottom line is that CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform is “the best endpoint solution, in my opinion, in the industry,” Renfrow said.

CRN has reached out to CrowdStrike for comment.

‘Olympic Test’

The outage has also revealed that there is a lot more that organizations can do to ensure their own resiliency, solution provider executives said.

“Customers now realize they have to be better prepared for handling situations like this,” said Mitra of Mission Critical Systems. “This was an Olympic test of how resilient a customer would be.”

Without a doubt, an incident such as this “really shows you who had a plan,” said Tim Conkle, founder and CEO of Plano, Texas-based The 20 MSP.

“We’re talking about big companies with sophisticated networks,” Conkle said. “I think this was a big wake-up call [to develop] better plans for the ‘what-ifs.’”