CrowdStrike ranked highest in Growth and Innovation among all vendors as runtime-first security becomes the standard for cloud and AI workload protection
CrowdStrike announced it has been named the Growth and Innovation Leader in the 2026 Frost Radar™: Cloud and Application Runtime Security for the second consecutive time, scoring highest of all vendors evaluated. As AI workloads and frontier model risk expose the limits of posture-only defense, organizations are turning to runtime-first security on the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform to stop breaches in real time.
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Frost & Sullivan highlighted “CrowdStrike’s growth in runtime security is supported by the broader market shift from posture-centric cloud security toward runtime detection and response” and noted this shift aligns “directly with CrowdStrike’s strengths in cloud workload protection, real-time CDR, and integrated response.”
“Posture management surfaces risks. Runtime security stops breaches. The market is choosing platforms that deliver both,” said Elia Zaitsev, chief technology officer, CrowdStrike. “As adversaries weaponize frontier AI models to collapse the window between vulnerability and exploit, CrowdStrike delivers real-time protection at the point of execution, stopping breaches before impact.”
Key report findings include:
Runtime-First Cloud Security
Frost & Sullivan highlighted CrowdStrike’s “clear advantage” in cloud runtime security delivering “faster cloud threat detection, investigation, prioritization, and remediation within existing SOC workflows, not through the management of separate cloud security operations.”
Real-Time Detection and Response
As the pioneer of Cloud Detection and Response (CDR), the report identified “CrowdStrike’s most differentiated capability is CDR” citing its “real-time detection architecture” that reduces “latency from minutes to seconds” and enables “automated cloud response actions.”
Unified Architecture
CrowdStrike closes the gap between cloud risk and runtime defense, uniting posture management and detection and response in a single CNAPP. CrowdStrike’s “core value proposition” is its “ability to correlate telemetry across cloud infrastructure, workloads, identities, applications, data, and AI services” through “a unified platform for prevention, detection, investigation, and response across major multi-cloud and hybrid environments.”
Protecting AI Workloads
As enterprises race to deploy AI, cybersecurity has become foundational AI infrastructure. Frost recognized CrowdStrike’s recent AI innovations “reinforce its differentiation as a vendor that connects cloud risk, workload behavior, AI workload exposure,” in a single, unified platform “for better risk management and threat detection & response.”
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