CrowdStrike and Dell partner to secure the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA

A unified security foundation

CrowdStrike and Dell Technologies have announced a new integrated security solution designed for the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA. This collaboration allows customers to use the CrowdStrike Falcon platform to protect various layers of their AI operations, including infrastructure, workloads, agents, and applications. By combining these technologies, the companies aim to provide a secure environment for enterprise AI adoption.

The partnership is structured through Dell Technologies’ AI Ecosystem Program. This allows customers to purchase AI infrastructure and CrowdStrike security as a bundle, specifically aligned with NVIDIA’s AI Factory Reference Architecture. This alignment is intended to give organizations a validated and optimized path toward using artificial intelligence at scale.

The goal of this integration is to ensure that security is not an afterthought in the development of AI systems. According to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz, "Security cannot be an afterthought in an AI-powered world." By making AI-native protection foundational, the companies hope to give enterprises the confidence they need to innovate safely.

Protecting AI agents and apps

One of the primary components of this new offering is the security of AI agents. These are software entities that can perform tasks on behalf of users, and they require specific protections to prevent malicious behavior. CrowdStrike's Falcon Guardian provides visibility and control over these agents, offering runtime protection against specific threats like prompt injection.

Prompt injection occurs when an attacker provides specific inputs to an AI model to trick it into performing unauthorized actions or revealing private information. Falcon Guardian is also designed to detect unexpected behaviors and prevent the exposure of sensitive data. This is a critical layer of defense for companies that are integrating agents into their daily workflows.

The solution is built on the NVIDIA OpenShell Reference Architecture. It currently includes the NVIDIA OpenShell secure runtime and has plans to add further integrations. These future additions will include NVIDIA Sentry and NVIDIA BlueField-4 DPUs, which are specialized processors designed to extend security from the software level down to the silicon hardware.

Securing infrastructure and workloads

Beyond individual agents, the partnership also focuses on the underlying infrastructure that powers AI. Falcon Cloud Security is included to provide unified security from the code level to the runtime environment. This helps organizations identify vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that could be exploited by attackers.

This specific capability is designed to protect workloads across various environments, such as containers and Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an open-source system used to manage multiple containerized applications, making it a standard for modern cloud deployments. By securing these environments, the solution ensures that the core AI workloads remain stable and protected from external threats.

To manage these complex security layers, the offering includes Falcon Next-Gen SIEM. This tool brings together data from various sources to provide AI-powered detection, investigation, and response. It is designed to accelerate the process of identifying threats and stopping breaches before they can cause significant damage to an organization's operations.

Managed services and monitoring

To simplify the management of these security tools, Dell is expanding its Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services. These services are designed to exclusively manage the CrowdStrike capabilities within the Dell AI Factory. This provides a managed experience where security experts handle the heavy lifting of monitoring and threat hunting.

The MDR service provides 24x7 monitoring across the entire AI stack. This means that whether a threat targets the hardware, the software, or the AI agents themselves, Dell's services are designed to detect it. The goal is to help organizations identify threats earlier, contain any successful attacks quickly, and recover critical AI operations with minimal downtime.

This end-to-end approach is intended to reduce the complexity of securing AI. For many enterprises, managing multiple security tools from different vendors can be difficult. By integrating these services into a single managed offering, Dell and CrowdStrike aim to provide a clearer path for organizations to achieve their AI goals while maintaining a strong security posture.

The path to AI adoption

The collaboration highlights a growing trend where hardware providers, chipmakers, and security firms work together to create