CrowdStrike, the company at the heart of the IT outage being described as the worst the world has seen, has been a darling of Wall Street over the last year.
So far in 2024, its share price has risen by 96%, making it one of the best-performing stocks on both the tech-heavy Nasdaq and the broader S&P 500 index – to which it was recently admitted – meaning the company was valued at $84bn as at the close on Thursday night.
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How CrowdStrike thrilled investors
What thrilled investors was how the company, based in Austin, Texas, sold itself as a one-stop shop in the field of so-called ‘endpoint’ protection and how a lot of what it was doing was AI-enabled.
Endpoint protection originally began as straightforward anti-virus software but over the last decade, has evolved into the provision of a series of services aimed at protecting endpoints, those physical devices – computers, laptops, mobile phones, tablets and servers – that are connected to a network.
Those services include threat detection and investigation, data leak prevention and network administration.
Massive market share made it so popular
Several factors, in particular, made CrowdStrike so popular. First was its market share – some 24% – of the endpoint protection market.
Second was the migration of data and the provision of IT services to the cloud, a transformational shift that increased demand for cyber security services.
At the end of last year, less than half of global workloads had been migrated to the cloud, pointing to a big uptick in future demand.
A key time for cybersecurity spending
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, were new rules announced at the end of 2023 by the Securities &…
