The remote shell and the remediation are the two that really stand out as valuable features. The remote shell function that it offers is something that I use almost daily. It allows us to quietly and discreetly sign in on a user's computer, but only as admin. It prevents any sort of security issues or security risks to a user, which would be probably our favorite.
The remediation is really nice as it gives a very clear understanding of where a file came from. For example, in our use of it, there are a couple of files that we had that we didn't even know that we had. There was software that no one was aware was installed on these machines more than three years ago; we actually learned about that software once SentinelOne was installed. The level of optics it gives you is just incredible.
With that software, as soon as we installed SentinelOne, there were a couple of different applications and software that were immediately flagged as tracking user information and things like that. We found out that there was actually some sort of remote surveillance software that the past iteration of the IT team had installed and tested that just never got removed. We ended up tracking down the vendor for that and getting their assurance that that was no longer being used.
The real-time detection and response capabilities overall are great. I've never used anything that was as fast as this. The software that we used to use, Sophos, was comparable, however, it had a noticeable impact on the user. The bigger thing for me is that there isn't an impact on my end users. When we are actually running a scan, let's say, if we find that there's an impact, it's very quick. We've tested it by throwing malicious software onto our test machines just to see how quickly SentinelOne actually picks it up. And it's literally within seconds. When you actually do a scan, you can scan your higher fleet, and it's done relatively quickly as long as those machines are powered on. And it will act the second that those machines power on and connect to the Internet again to get that signal. I've never used anything as quick, personally.
The forensic visibility into the Linux terminal is not something we use as we actually don't use any Linux machines ourselves, so I couldn't speak to that. As far as visibility goes, we're primarily a Mac organization, and we have ten percent of our users on PC. As far as Mac goes, the visibility is fantastic. Same with the PC side of things.
The historical data record, from what they had shown us in the demo, looks pretty incredible. We thankfully have not suffered an attack that required historical data.
In terms of our mean time to detect, I don't think we ever had it. Since we're a small organization, we haven't had any real issues with genuine malware attacks. I can't speak to a scenario where while we were on Sophos, we experienced one. When we've had security audits that have tried to pen test for us, we have not had any issues with SentinelOne whatsoever. Every time that we've attempted to see how accurate and how quickly it can detect an infection or intrusion, it's being caught immediately.
The same is true for mean time to remediate. Any remediation that we do, for example, as soon as we block off a file, the automatic remediations are nice. In the event that we want to have something behave differently on another machine, we can quickly change that once we see it in any incident log. Setting those permanent rules is very helpful since, if you know something's malicious, chances are you don't want it showing up anywhere else.
The product has helped free up your SOC staff to work on other projects or tasks. The work that we used to have to do with our previous provider in going through our vulnerability assessments on a monthly basis and in trying to track down the install path of different applications was a headache and a half. With SentinelOne, the application management, and vulnerability assessments, are easy. You can see directly to the file path. It cuts a significant enough time out of our day.
It's had a positive impact on our overall productivity. Being able to dig through and find applications faster has drastically cut down our vulnerability position. When we first started using Singularity, we were somewhere in the thousands. Within the first month of having used it for our vulnerability assessments, we were down to just 1600, and now we're sitting well under the 500 mark when it comes to critical vulnerabilities. It's been very drastic and exponential at that. Now, any time a vulnerability does pop up, it's very quick and easy for us to track down where it is and take immediate action.
The interoperability with third-party solutions is fine. We don't currently use Kubernetes in our organization, however, we do utilize a VPN and it has no issues with adapting to that VPN. We also utilize different storage, including cloud storage accounts. There are no issues there either.
They've been fantastic at supporting innovation. We've had their support; they're always very responsive and very quick to give us the right advice on how we can execute what we're looking to do. Making sure that you have access to the necessary system without interrupting your user and without your user feeling at risk of their privacy being invaded is huge.