Many modern cloud security challenges come down to visibility. The complexity of modern environments, the deluge of alerts, and the lack of relevant context make it difficult for security teams to identify and prioritize threats — and easy for adversaries to slip through undetected.

The findings of a commissioned Forrester Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study, conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of CrowdStrike, reveal the measurable benefits of unifying cloud security posture management and runtime protection on a single platform that secures cloud workloads and AI infrastructure at the point of execution.

Forrester analyzed a composite organization representative of interviewed customers that deployed CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security. Its study is based on the real experiences of security leaders operating large, complex cloud environments.

The results show clear financial and operational value: Falcon Cloud Security delivered a 264% return on investment over three years, with payback starting in less than six months by providing runtime controls that prevent or rapidly contain active threats, along with unified visibility across multicloud assets; real-time, cross-domain context; and AI-assisted triage. The total quantified benefits totaled $13.8 million USD. 

Greater Insight Accelerates Detection and Response 

Organizations used Falcon Cloud Security to improve runtime behavioral visibility, reduce noise, and centralize cloud and workload telemetry into a single investigative plane. By bringing workload, identity, and endpoint signals into one workflow, interviewees could correlate data across domains to quickly isolate threats. This accelerated cloud threat detection and response, and expanded their overall SOC capacity. With higher-confidence behavioral analytics and fewer false positives, analysts spent less time triaging alerts and more time on real threats.

Mean time to detect improved by 20-30%, and mean time to respond improved by roughly 30%, supported by stronger behavioral analytics and reduced alert noise. Organizations reported sustained reductions in incident response labor and said their teams could identify issues earlier, isolate them faster, and close investigations with less effort.

An information security leader at a telecommunications company explained how their organization was able to gather more high-quality context in less time:  

“[Before CrowdStrike], I would have to either go to the account owner or try to get access and pull the configs directly from a one-off standpoint and try to answer those questions … We get more insight now for our security analysts around activity that occurs, as well as the configuration of the assets that those activities occur on. It’s definitely more efficient because that’s a lot of time saved for the analysts."

These efficiency gains in accelerated cloud detection and response delivered $5.9 million USD in risk-adjusted value — the largest quantified benefit in the study.

45% Improvement in Cloud Security

Before adopting Falcon Cloud Security, interviewed customers reported escalating cloud risk driven by rapid scaling, misconfigurations, and noisy decentralized environments that obscured visibility into assets, configurations, and runtime activity. Fragmented tooling and manual processes led to high false positives and missed alerts. A high volume of findings, without context, made it tough to determine which risks needed action.

These organizations sought to improve their cloud security programs to keep up with the pace of cloud adoption and the growing pressure of cloud-focused threats. Their goals reflected a need to reduce cost and risk, streamline investigation and remediation, and unify their cloud security initiatives under a scalable model.

They adopted Falcon Cloud Security, which drove a 45% improvement in cloud security due to better visibility and detection of cloud runtime threats. Beyond stronger security outcomes, this improvement translated to nearly $2 million USD in risk-adjusted value over three years.

A Single Hub to Identify and Prioritize High-risk Misconfigurations 

Interviewees discussed how Falcon Cloud Security reduced the number of products needed to identify and fix misconfigurations, as it gave developers a single source for cloud asset configuration, vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, exposure paths, and compliance.

With access to unified posture insights and runtime controls, including for Kubernetes and containers, developers could quickly identify which assets were exposed without sorting through noise. Automated detection triage and AI-driven prioritization helped reduce false positives and limited full escalations, so developers could shift their focus from triaging alerts to resolving critical problems.

An IT product and compliance manager at a smart manufacturing company shared:

“[With CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security], data accuracy and data precision are higher, which means you need to invest [less] time in monitoring and investigating. The availability of that data is faster because you can go through the [platform], while previously, you had to go into [several] different tools, so you also save time there. And third, you have [visibility from] a user point of view on a global scale.”

With AI-driven prioritization and unified visibility across cloud assets, containers, and CI/CD pipelines, teams were able to achieve a 30% reduction in time to identify and prioritize high-risk vulnerabilities and misconfigurations. These improvements translated to nearly $4.5 million USD in productivity gains.

$1.4M Saved by Reducing Multicloud Security Costs

Organizations in the study consolidated their multicloud security stack and brought signals, context, and workflows into a single experience. This allowed teams to eliminate redundant tools and capabilities, implement automated workflows, and simplify compliance, posture management, and remediation in a single interface.

By reducing complexity and unifying operations, organizations improved efficiency across security and development teams, resulting in a 12% reduction in multicloud security technology costs. In total, these consolidation and efficiency gains delivered $1.4 million USD in cost savings over three years.

As one security leader shared:

“We replaced several redundant technologies for $1.1 million per year in savings. This equates to about 5% of the overall security budget.”

The Advantage of Unified Cloud Security

The organizations in this study fundamentally changed how their teams operate. Instead of chasing low-priority findings and navigating disconnected tools, they built a model where visibility, context, and response are unified from the start.

This shift is critical in today’s threat landscape. Adversaries move across identity, endpoint, and cloud in minutes, often exploiting the gaps that exist between technologies. Most security operations are still fragmented, making it difficult to detect and stop these attacks in time.

Organizations that are well-positioned to stop today’s adversaries focus on accelerated cloud detection and response, prioritize risk based on real-world exposure, investigate threats with full context, reduce noise, and unify workflows across security and development teams.

CrowdStrike believes the Forrester TEI study validates this approach by demonstrating improved security, faster operations, and measurable ROI. The full study breaks down the exact ROI model, cost savings, and financial impact across security, operations, and development teams. Download the full study to see how these results apply to your organization and request a Falcon Cloud Security demo to see unified cloud protection in action.

Additional Resources

• Be part of Fal.Con 2026 and connect with 10,000+ cybersecurity professionals shaping the future of the industry.
• Learn more about CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security.
• Watch this short video to see Falcon Cloud Security in action.
• Read customer success stories.
• Request a Falcon Cloud Security demo to see unified cloud protection in action.