We didn't choose CrowdStrike because a vendor briefed us well. We chose it because in our cyber range, it took 3 months to bypass. Everything else we tested was compromised in under 3 days.
Ridge IT is a CrowdStrike MSSP Partner offering three managed packages: Ridge IT Defend (NGAV + EDR + managed monitoring), Ridge IT Advanced Defend (+ OverWatch threat hunting), and Ridge IT Complete (+ identity threat protection). Every client is deployed on CrowdStrike's Falcon Government stack — the same FedRAMP-authorized infrastructure used by federal agencies — not the standard commercial cloud. Our SOC provides full triage on every alert — persistence checks, PowerShell inspection, C2 analysis — following our 1-10-60 response framework. You own your licenses. We've protected 700+ organizations and 2.5 million+ people on this stack.
These aren't figures from a vendor brochure. The cyber range results are Ridge IT's own. The external data comes from independent sources cited below.
A lot of MSSPs offer "CrowdStrike-based services" because CrowdStrike has good marketing. We offer it because we ran the competition through a controlled test environment and looked at the data.
"CrowdStrike is the only solution that ever learned during our testing period. Things that weren't blocked on the initial run were getting blocked 15 days later — without us telling CrowdStrike anything. It saw the pattern, didn't flag it initially, then figured it out. That's not just hype. That thing is actually getting smarter in real time."
CrowdStrike's Threat Graph correlates 3 trillion endpoint events per week — that's the AI training data behind every detection. The models get smarter with every attack observed across the global install base.
One agent. No signature updates pulling bandwidth. No scheduled scans grinding endpoints to a halt. It deploys via your existing MDM, runs invisibly in the background, and does its detection work through behavioral analysis — not file scanning.
CrowdStrike has been named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Endpoint Protection Platforms for the 6th year in a row (2025) — more consecutive years than any other pure-play endpoint vendor.
Every package includes the CrowdStrike Falcon agent deployed on CrowdStrike's Falcon Government stack — the FedRAMP-authorized infrastructure CrowdStrike operates for government-grade environments — not the standard commercial cloud. Every client gets custom IoA/IoC rules: attack patterns caught on any client automatically protect every client in the network. And every client gets Ridge IT embedded in their tenant from day one — no escalation queue, no hand-off delay.
"We spend all this money building the biggest wall in the world to keep people out — but once they're in, we're whistling Dixie on identity. That's the gap. CrowdStrike's identity module closes it."
— Perry Schumacher, Chief Strategy Officer, Ridge IT Cyber
Most MSSPs hand you a license and a dashboard. We deploy it, configure it to your environment, tune it to reduce noise, and run every alert through full triage. Every client is deployed on CrowdStrike's Falcon Government stack — the FedRAMP-authorized infrastructure CrowdStrike operates for government-grade environments, not the standard commercial tenant. And every custom IoA or IoC our team builds gets pushed to all client tenants automatically — so attack patterns caught on any one client protect every client in our network.
We map your existing endpoint landscape, identify legacy AV to replace, build exclusion policies for legitimate business processes, and set detection thresholds before a single agent is deployed. Most problems in CrowdStrike deployments come from skipping this step. Deployment is $3,500 one-time and covers tenant setup, MDM push prep, initial alert tuning, and AV conflict resolution.
We deploy Falcon in detection-only mode first across a pilot group, review the alert volume, eliminate false positives, and tune policies against your real environment. Once policies are stable, we expand to full prevention mode across the entire fleet. Custom IoAs built during this phase flow down to all Ridge IT clients automatically.
Every alert follows our 1-10-60 framework: 1 minute to detect and flag, 10 minutes to have an analyst actively investigating, 60 minutes to make the isolate-or-not decision. After 60 minutes, lateral spread has likely started — so we treat that line as the hard cutoff. Every detection gets persistence checks, PowerShell inspection, and C2 analysis. Not just the criticals.
We get asked about self-managing Falcon, legacy AV, and other managed providers. Here's a straightforward comparison of what you actually get.
| Capability | CrowdStrike + Ridge IT | Self-Managed Falcon | Legacy AV (Trellix, Symantec) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alert monitoring | ✓ Full triage every alert | △ Depends on your team hours | ✗ Signature-based, no MDR |
| Threat hunting | ✓ Falcon OverWatch + Ridge IT analysts | △ OverWatch only (no human overlay) | ✗ Not included |
| Incident response | ✓ Full remediation included | △ You handle containment | ✗ Requires separate IR retainer |
| Identity threat detection | ✓ Falcon Identity + Okta integration | △ Available, your team configures | ✗ Not included |
| Policy tuning & noise reduction | ✓ Ongoing by Ridge IT engineers | △ Your responsibility | ✗ Signature updates only |
| SIEM/XDR integration | ✓ Native Sentinel + Zscaler correlation | △ Possible with engineering effort | ✗ Limited or none |
| CMMC/FedRAMP support | ✓ Falcon Gov stack available | △ Available, you manage compliance | ✗ Not FedRAMP authorized |
| Endpoint performance impact | ✓ Single lightweight agent | ✓ Same (same agent) | ✗ Known for heavy CPU/memory footprint; signature updates and scheduled scans impact endpoint performance |
| License ownership | ✓ You own them, full console access | ✓ You own them | △ Typically vendor-locked |
When evaluating modern endpoint detection and response platforms, three names dominate: CrowdStrike Falcon, SentinelOne Singularity, and Palo Alto Cortex. Each brings distinct strengths to threat detection, response capabilities, and enterprise integration. Ridge IT has deployed and tested all three against real threat samples in our cyber range. Here's how they actually stack up.
A well-executed CrowdStrike deployment doesn't happen overnight. Our crawl-walk-run methodology spans 30 to 90 days depending on your environment. Understanding what happens at each phase helps you plan resource allocation, coordinate with your IT team, and set realistic expectations for when full endpoint protection is operational.
CrowdStrike doesn't operate in isolation. The reason Ridge IT's stack is effective is that each tool feeds intelligence to the others. For a broader look at how to evaluate managed detection providers, see our MDR provider guide. Here's how Falcon integrates with the rest of our platform.
Falcon feeds every detection, process event, and network connection into Azure Sentinel as the central SIEM. Sentinel correlates endpoint data against identity signals, email threats, and cloud activity — so an attack that hops between vectors gets caught as a single campaign, not three separate alerts.
Falcon Identity Protection watches for credential abuse — pass-the-hash, golden ticket, privilege escalation — and cross-references with Okta's adaptive MFA. When a credential is compromised, the endpoint signal and the identity signal arrive simultaneously, triggering automated response before lateral movement begins.
If CrowdStrike detects suspicious behavior on an endpoint, that context updates Zscaler's Zero Trust policy in near real-time. A compromised device can be isolated at the network layer — blocking data exfiltration and C2 communication — before the endpoint remediation is even complete.
CrowdStrike Falcon is the endpoint layer of a comprehensive zero trust architecture. Explore complementary services that work alongside endpoint protection.
Secure cloud access, private application access, and data loss prevention across your network.
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Explore OT Security →Tell us about your current endpoint environment. We'll tell you whether CrowdStrike is the right fit, which tier makes sense, and what a deployment actually looks like for your specific stack.
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