Why we chose CrowdStrike, and what we would want to know in your position.

Independent recognition

These are the third-party results CrowdStrike reports. We link to the sources so you can read them yourself.

• Gartner: named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms, the seventh consecutive time.^[1]
• Forrester: named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Managed Detection and Response Services in Europe, Q3 2025.^[2]
• AV-TEST: AV-TEST Award 2025 for Best macOS Security for corporate users.^[3]
• MITRE ATT&CK: CrowdStrike reports 100% detection and protection with no false positives in the 2025 Enterprise Evaluations. MITRE itself does not rank vendors, and several vendors did not take part that year.^[4]

Compared with Microsoft Defender

Many UK businesses already have Microsoft Defender for Business through Microsoft 365 Business Premium. It is a good product, and Microsoft is also a Leader in Gartner's endpoint protection Magic Quadrant.^[5] We will not pretend otherwise.

The honest summary: if you have someone who watches Defender's alerts every day, Defender may be enough. If nobody does, the value of Falcon is CrowdStrike's people watching for you. When Falcon is installed, Defender antivirus moves into passive mode, and the rest of your Microsoft 365 security carries on as before.

Read the full CrowdStrike vs Defender comparison

The July 2024 outage

On 19 July 2024, a faulty content update from CrowdStrike caused Windows computers running Falcon to crash. Microsoft estimated around 8.5 million Windows devices were affected worldwide.^[7] It was not a cyber attack, but it was serious, and many businesses lost a day or more.

CrowdStrike published a full root cause analysis and changed how content updates are validated, tested and released, including staged rollouts.^[8] We think you should weigh this up for yourself, and we are happy to talk through what changed and what it would mean for you.