What is our primary use case?
We use SentinelOne Singularity Complete for all of our endpoints, including virtual machines, physical servers, and laptops.
How has it helped my organization?
The solution gives us a good sense that the systems are secured against malware, drive-by fileless attacks, and advanced behavioral attacks. This is our primary reason for having the product, and it does a good job in that regard.
It does not require a lot of management. It is hard to quantify the time savings but it does not require a lot of our time. If I spend an hour a week on it, that is a lot.
It is hard to quantify the reduction in the mean time to detect unless you are a pretty big organization and you are tracking that. However, it has been able to detect things and alert about them pretty much instantly in the console. We also get emails right after that. In terms of the Vigilance MDR service, one Saturday morning, I tripped an alert for something I was doing. I thought of waiting and seeing how long it would take on a Saturday morning at 10 AM for them to jump in and figure it out. They took about 20 minutes.
Any good endpoint security product should reduce your organizational risks, and SentinelOne Singularity Complete has done that. It is almost impossible to quantify the reduction.
We were able to easily realize its benefits within 30 days.
What is most valuable?
The console is light years better than the CrowdStrike console, which had just a bunch of different screens cobbled together. It is much more unified and much easier to work with. It is very nicely designed. It is one of the better user interfaces I have ever seen for web application management.
The product is pretty easy to manage and pretty easy to deploy. It also has a pretty low resource footprint.
What needs improvement?
The false alerts can be annoying, especially during administrative tasks. We have had a number of occasions where the software impacted a third-party application, so the application would either not run or exhibit other technical issues. We were also not getting any alerts in the console to indicate that SentinelOne was having a negative interaction with the product. Finally, after hours of troubleshooting, we turned off the endpoint security for the product, and the application just started working fine. We have probably had a good half dozen of those. It is quite annoying.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have had experience with SentinelOne Singularity Complete for two years.
How are customer service and support?
Their support is top-notch. I have been in the business for thirty years, and I have dealt with just about every support company out there. I am used to mediocre enterprise support, but SentinelOne's support is very good, deserving a ten out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were running CrowdStrike prior to SentinelOne. We were using CrowdStrike Complete, but it was simply way too expensive to sustain for our budget. We were looking for something that was equally capable and did not have a huge price tag with it, so we ended up going with SentinelOne and their Vigilance MDR service.
SentinelOne Singularity Complete has not helped us consolidate other solutions. It was a one-for-one replacement for CrowdStrike. It has not helped us to get rid of anything at this point.
I have used Bitdefender in the past. We had their GravityZone Ultra, which had XDR Complete, but there were so many alerts. We would literally spend hours. We would pick a day a week or a day every couple of weeks and try to trace down alerts and clear out the console. From that perspective, SentinelOne does give off fewer false positives. However, when we are dealing with administrator or network administrator or developer tools, for obvious reasons, they tend to trip the alerts on the product. For normal end-user work, there are seldom any false positives or alerts that are not valid. It is almost never. I am the IT director, and it is always tripping on things I am doing. When I install some encryption software or disk wipe software, I get many alerts in SentinelOne, but for the actual end-users, typically, we do not get any false positives.
How was the initial setup?
We use their public cloud. We deploy the agents ourselves. We do the updates through their public cloud, but we do the initial deployment ourselves.
The initial setup was pretty straightforward. There are some nuances to the product, naturally. It is an enterprise-class endpoint security product, so there are things that you need to learn and understand about how it works. The same is true of CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Cortex, or any other product in the same category.
We have multiple locations with about 35 remote users.
What about the implementation team?
We used their onboarding service, which was very helpful because we would have meetings every week or two with the actual SentinelOne employee engineer to talk about our deployment and ask questions about particular features and best practices. It was worth the extra expense.
I had one other network administrator working on it with me, and I just assigned him the task of deploying software and working with me on some of the policy configurations.
I do most of the maintenance on it. The maintenance typically requires adding an exclusion here or there, troubleshooting an issue, or uploading logs for support to look at an issue or a question that we have. I do not spend 50 hours a year on it.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
SentinelOne is significantly less expensive than CrowdStrike. I recently did a price comparison between CrowdStrike and SentinelOne to determine where we are going for the next three years. CrowdStrike is 200% to 300% the cost.
For their complete service, we were paying CrowdStrike 45K for 85 endpoints for a year. We have stepped down, and we are doing MDR and not having SentinelOne manage our policies and things. We have 200 endpoints, and our yearly cost is 17K, so we have gone from 45K to 17K. From a detection standpoint, depending upon which MITRE framework tests you look at, both vendors jockey up and down in the top ten. They are pretty comparable from a performance and efficacy standpoint, so there is not a 200% to 300% gap there.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I always do a round-robin. My final three ended up being Palo Alto Network's Cortex product and CrowdStrike's Falcon product, the lesser version of their MDR Overwatch product.
The thing that I did not like about Overwatch was that they would tell you that something was going on and here is what you should do, but they would not help you with it. SentinelOne was a little bit more helpful in terms of hopping in. Ultimately, Palo Alto is not support-friendly. I use Palo Alto Firewalls, and their support is not that great. It has not been for a while, so I hesitate to go into their endpoint security as well. It is also expensive. It requires a lot more infrastructure and cost to deploy. It is probably more akin to CrowdStrike from a cost perspective.
I briefly considered Bitdefender's MDR solution using GravityZone where they did the MDR piece of it. It was probably half or a third of what we would have spent for SentinelOne, but I did not have the sense that it was quite the next-gen product that I was looking for, even though it scored pretty well.
All these are very similar because they base their activity on what a piece of software is trying to do on the system. It is a real-time behavioral analysis. They do not use predefined signatures from the last 25 years. They are trying to do things in real time. In terms of how long it takes to have visibility into what an application is doing and how quickly they can lock it down once they have the visibility, each vendor scores differently, but each of these three would generally be considered in anybody's top five.
SentinelOne is fairly innovative. I like what they are doing with the integration of their Purple AI for being able to do real-language queries of their telemetry data. You do not need to know all the correct syntax, which helps us non-SecOps folks who have to dabble in it periodically. We can do real-world queries. I have not asked for pricing on that. It is probably more than I want to pay for it, given that we do not get too much use out of this kind of feature, but they are continuing to innovate in that regard. From that perspective, it is a good product.
What other advice do I have?
SentinelOne Singularity Complete is very mature at this point.
We have not yet had an occasion to integrate it, although, in a couple of weeks, we are going to be integrating their Cloud Funnel service with another MDR provider, Red Canary. We have not done that yet, and we have not made use of their other interoperability pieces.
They have two Ranger products. One is the Ranger Identity Protection product, which is kind of an add-on product, and the other one is more of a rogue detection product. We did subscribe to the Ranger Identity Protection product, but it was so difficult to work with that we finally stopped using it. It was a subscription.
Our correlation is whatever is going on in the endpoints. We are not pulling in Palo Alto firewall telemetry, or Okta or O365 data at this point, but we are moving in that direction. We are simply using it for endpoint security and for their Vigilance MDR service.
SentinelOne is good as a strategic partner. We are in the third year of our three-year contract and plan to continue with them. We are not going to go directly to them. We are going to go through one of their partners, Red Canary, but we will be using the SentinelOne Complete product and then using Red Canary to do the MDR along with active remediation and SIEM ingestion of our Okta data, our Palo Alto firewall data, and our O365 data. They can then begin to cross-correlate events and attacks across different attack surfaces of ours.
I would rate SentinelOne Singularity Complete a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Other
*Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
