We use it for endpoint protection. It's an active EDR endpoint protection tool. Think of it as an antivirus and endpoint protection solution with machine learning, like McAfee on steroids.
In our company it is deployed in 83 countries and on over 40,000 workstations and servers.
It provides incredible visibility in a single pane of glass. The dashboard gives me visibility over all the endpoints, which are broken down by country, and then broken down within each country by brand and machine type. It provides a very simple way for me to understand if
- we're being targeted globally
- my endpoints are actively being attacked
- we have outstanding issues in any one region
- we have malicious activity.
In addition, it logs to my SIEM tool, cloud-natively, which makes it a very effective weapon to help diagnose and remediate any potential bad actors in my environment.
The Behavioral AI feature for ransomware and anti-malware protection does an outstanding job of identifying abnormal behavior patterns in my environment. Once we allowed it to sit in learning mode for about 30 days, we switched all our endpoints into what is called Protect mode, instead of Detect mode. With Protect mode, we have different functions available to us, such as kill, quarantine, identify, and rollback. Using those features, we are really able to protect our endpoints much better. We take advantage of the fact that we have a machine, or an automated process, governing our endpoint protection. That reduces the total headcount needed to babysit my environment.
Furthermore, Behavioral AI recognizes novel and fileless attacks and responds in real-time. It improves my security, reduces my total cost of ownership and management, and provides enhanced protection for what is now a highly mobile population. Due to COVID-19, we have had to take most of our workforce, and that's over 40,000 people around the world, and give them access to work remotely through a series of different mechanisms. In doing so, we felt much more comfortable because we have this endpoint protection tool deployed. It provides us not only the visibility into what the tool is doing and how it's protecting us, but it allows us to look at what applications are installed, what IP range is coming on, and what network it's sourced from.
And with Ranger we're able to help identify additional networks. Using SentinelOne with Ranger, allowed us to take a look at some of our smaller offices in Asia Pacific where we didn't have exceptional visibility.
We also use the solution’s automatic remediation and rollback in Protect mode, without human intervention. I want to protect mode for both malicious and suspicious, and that is in Protect mode. Having turned that on, we saw no negative impact, across the board, which has been an outstanding feature for us. It does save time on having to go in and identify things, because we allowed it to run in learning mode for so long. It learned our business processes. It learned what's normal. It learned file types. It learned everything that we do enough that, when I did turn that feature on, there were no helpdesk calls, no madness ensued, no people complaining that files were being removed that they needed. It worked out very well for us.
We also use the solution’s ActiveEDR technology. Its automatic monitoring of every OS process, at all times, improves our security operations greatly. There is a learning time involved. It has to learn what processes are normal. But the fact that it's actively engaged with every process—every file that moves across it, every DLL that's launched, whether or not it's automated or process-driven—everything is viewed, inspected, and categorized. And it allows us to have enhanced visibility that ties directly into the Deep Visibility. I can look at and help identify behavior patterns.
For example, yesterday I wrote a series of queries for Deep Visibility that are based on MITRE ATT&CK parameters. Those give me reports, on a daily basis, of how effective this tool really is because I can use MITRE ATT&CK engine parameters to help define what's going on. Even if something is not considered malicious behavior by the tool itself, if I take that information and couple it with information I can pull from Tanium and information I pull from other tool sets, and aggregate that into my SIEM tool, my use case is provided. I get more positive and actionable intelligence on how my endpoints are behaving. If I have somebody out there who is doing testing of software, I can pick that out of a crowd in a second.
We have application control and containers available. Since we have AWS, Azure, and a myriad of cloud platforms, it's been hugely beneficial to us. Considering that we are endeavoring, as an organization, to move into cloud-based solutions, this has been a huge benefit.
Overall, SentinelOne has absolutely reduced incident response time. It's instantaneous. It has reduced it by at least 95 percent.
I use the tool to help me determine how well my other tools are working. For example, we have a role called a RISO, a regional information security officer. Those people are responsible for regions of the globe, whether it be Latin America, Asia Pacific, or AMEA. The RISOs now use the tool because it can help them identify other tools we have rolled out, like Zscaler. They can go into the SentinelOne console and query for Zscaler and look at all the machines in their environment and determine what the delta is. It allows people with different levels of knowledge and different roles in an organization to have visibility. It's been outstanding. That, in and of itself, makes it a better tool than its counterparts and it makes it usable for non-technical and non-security people.
We get the long-term strategic benefits of having enhanced visibility and the more short-term tactical benefits of knowing that our endpoints are protected, the visibility is there, and that no matter what lands on top of it, it's going to get taken care of.
