Follow The Crowd

At Vestact our job is to think ahead and try to get you into sectors before they become mainstream. As part of our research process, we generally buy shares in our personal name that we think clients could own in the future because the best way to track a company is to have skin in the game. A stock that I bought earlier this year is a company called Crowdstrike. If you are an F1 fan, their logo appeared on the Mercedes car at some point this year.

Crowdstrike is a cybersecurity company based in California. It was founded in 2011, and they listed in June 2019. Since then the share price has gone from around $60 a share to $167 on Friday night. Traditional security and anti-virus companies put a database on your computer, and then scan all data against that database. The problem is that this process significantly slows down the performance of your computer, not to mention the fact that the database is out of date before it is even installed on your machine. The Crowdstrike solution is to use AI and the cloud to monitor your computer.

We are living in an age where data is the new gold. As the value of data continues to increase, more and more people will look to steal that data. Just looking at JSE listed companies, there are at least three companies that come to mind who were hacked recently. The biggest weakness in any IT security plan is the sack of chemicals operating the computer keyboard. Unfortunately, IT can have the best plans in place, but if a user clicks on a weird link and then enters their password into a strange place, the whole network is compromised.

Crowdstrike learns user behaviour and then through their AI solution, flags events that look strange. With this being a cloud based solution, it happens in real-time too. The reason that I really like this company is that as they get bigger, their product will get better. Crowdstrike is continually learning and improving. Think about Google. When was the last time you used Bing? Years? You don't use Bing because they don't have the same data that Google does, meaning that their search results are just not as good. The same will happen with Crowdstrike, as they grow, it becomes harder for the competition to catch them.

As we generate more data, and as there is an increase in people working from home, there is an even greater need for a practical solution to protect company data.