Case Study: University of Westminster achieves 24/7 protection, 24-to-1 hour response and unified visibility with CrowdStrike Falcon Complete MDR

U.K. University Gains 24/7 Protection, Visibility and Response with CrowdStrike MDR

The University of Westminster, a London-based higher education institution with about 19,000 students and 2,000 staff, was struggling with a shifting cyber threat landscape during the COVID-19 pandemic. Legacy antivirus left the university reactive and blind to threats across diverse OS environments, ransomware risk was rising, and in-house teams only provided 9–5 coverage for roughly 5,400 endpoints—creating unacceptable operational and reputational risk.

The university deployed CrowdStrike Falcon Complete managed detection and response, rolling the lightweight agent to over 5,000 endpoints and 400 servers in weeks and phasing via a successful pilot. The MDR service delivered 24/7 detection and response, unified visibility across Windows, macOS, Linux and cloud workloads, and reduced response time from 24 hours to about one hour, improving remediation, root-cause analysis and eliminating the need to build a full in‑house SOC.

University of Westminster

Thierry Delaitre

Head of IT Developments, Information Systems and Support