SentinelOne Takes Fight To Legacy Vendors With Two New Features

SentinelOne is directly challenging traditional anti-virus vendors on their own turf by making it easier for businesses to control peripheral devices and the endpoint's firewall.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company adding Endpoint Firewall Control and Device Control to its core platform will make it easier for SentinelOne to fully replace incumbent endpoint vendors in a customer's ecosystem, according to Tomer Weingarten, co-founder and CEO. This is particularly true for Fortune 1000 companies, Weingarten said, who are more likely to be deploying device control today.

"This is probably the last piece that's really missing in our platform to fully replace legacy vendors in pretty much any account," Weingarten told CRN.

[Related: Q&A: SentinelOne CEO On Why Endpoint Security Vendors Will Win Out Over Firewall Vendors]

Other next-generation endpoint security vendors are focused primarily on better efficacy or visibility and EDR (endpoint detection and response) toolsets, Weingarten said, but struggle to provide a fully-fledged platform that really locks down the endpoint. As a result, Weingarten said a lot of these suppliers are still focused on augmenting existing endpoint security products.

In contrast, Weingarten said SentinelOne is a complete rip and replace of the incumbent vendor that's on the endpoint for 90 percent of the company's deals. SentinelOne had presented a roadmap to new customers that included plans to introduce device control and firewall orchestration imminently, which Weingarten said made it easier for enterprises to leave their existing endpoint security vendor behind.

"Clients want a singular horizontal platform that can cover every endpoint need that they have," Weingarten said.

SentinelOne Core will include the new device control capabilities, which allow for complete visibility into how USBs and other peripheral devices are being used as well as easy control and management of that usage. SentinelOne Core retails at $55 per endpoint for year for smaller organizations, while enterprises with more than 5,000 endpoints can purchase SentinelOne Core for $35 per endpoint per year.

SentinelOne Complete, meanwhile, includes both device control and endpoint firewall control, which help the SentinelOne agent block unauthorized network traffic flowing into or out of both across both Windows and macOS. SentinelOne Complete retails at $66 per endpoint for year for smaller firms, while firms with more than 5,000 endpoints can buy SentinelOne Complete for $42 per endpoint per year.

"This just opens up another section of the market that was, up until now, something that we couldn't address," Weingarten said.

Legacy vendors traditionally deployed device control in a very complex manner, Weingarten said, making it a pretty massive undertaking for smaller organizations. But SentinelOne's simplification and automation of device control should make it more applicable down-market, according to Weingarten.

Firewall orchestration, meanwhile, is incredibly strategic for SentinelOne since it gives the enterprise more control over what's coming into the endpoint and what's being sent out from the endpoint, Weingarten said. Having an endpoint platform that's able to control pretty much every aspect of communicating with the endpoint is critical in a zero trust security model, according to Weingarten.

Adding device control and endpoint firewall control to SentinelOne's platform will make channel partners more competitive and allow them to deliver a larger functionality set for the same price as today, Weingarten said. Specifically, Weingarten said the new features will make it possible to solution providers to access a wide variety of customer accounts that, up until now, had been inaccessible.

"This is a whole new segment in the market that typically wasn't open for next-generation vendors," Weingarten said. "And right now, there's a big opportunity for early-movers that touch those customers and are in need of these capabilities."