CrowdStrike (NASDAQ: CRWD) today announced it has been named the “strongest overall leader” in the 2026 Frost Radar™: Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) for the fourth consecutive time. CrowdStrike scored highest of all vendors in Growth and Innovation, driving the market shift from posture-only point protection to runtime-first platforms.

Adversaries now move across containers, Kubernetes, identities, and cloud control planes inside a single intrusion, abusing valid credentials to blend into legitimate activity. Legacy cloud security was built to scan for misconfigurations on a schedule, not stop an adversary operating at machine speed. Frost & Sullivan highlighted CrowdStrike’s “ability to operationalize workload protection through a mature integrated endpoint, identity, cloud, and SOC operational fabric….giving security teams a single architecture for posture visibility, vulnerability management, runtime protection, threat detection, and response.”

“Cloud and AI workloads are multiplying faster than legacy security can follow, and adversaries are exploiting the gap at machine speed,” said AJ Shipley, chief product officer, CrowdStrike. “Posture tools tell you what is exposed. Only runtime tells you what an adversary is actually doing. Falcon Cloud Security unifies proactive and runtime protection with adversary intelligence to stop breaches across AI workloads, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.”

Key report findings include:

Cloud Runtime Leader

“CWPP and cloud runtime remain the bedrock of CrowdStrike’s Falcon Cloud Security platform business….this gives CrowdStrike strong competitive advantage in a CWPP market that is shifting from periodic vulnerability and posture assessment toward active runtime defense, real-time cloud threat detection, and faster incident response.”

CDR and AI Security

“CrowdStrike’s innovation has been increasingly tied to cloud runtime security, CDR, AI security, and extending to application runtime context.”

Unified Architecture

“By using the same lightweight Falcon sensor, CrowdStrike can extend its runtime security across endpoints and cloud workloads, enabling organizations to adopt cloud workload protection, container runtime security, and CDR capabilities without deploying additional agents or managing separate infrastructure.”

Cloud Growth at Scale

“CWPP and runtime detection” make CrowdStrike “one of the largest and fastest-scaling” vendors in the market, driving the shift “toward runtime protection and response.”

To learn more about the 2026 Frost Radar™: Cloud Workload Protection Platforms, visit here and read our blog.

About CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike (NASDAQ: CRWD), a global cybersecurity leader, has redefined modern security with the world’s most advanced cloud-native platform for protecting critical areas of enterprise risk – endpoints and cloud workloads, identity and data.

Powered by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud and world-class AI, the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform leverages real-time indicators of attack, threat intelligence, evolving adversary tradecraft, and enriched telemetry from across the enterprise to deliver hyper-accurate detections, automated protection and remediation, elite threat hunting, and prioritized observability of vulnerabilities.

Purpose-built in the cloud with a single lightweight-agent architecture, the Falcon platform delivers rapid and scalable deployment, superior protection and performance, reduced complexity, and immediate time-to-value.

CrowdStrike: We stop breaches.

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