SentinelOne is hailing what it calls a “paradigm shift” in cloud security with the announcement on January 3 that it is acquiring PingSafe, known for its cloud native application protection platform (CNAAP).
The acquisition is M&A deal No. 5 that MSSP Alert and sister site ChannelE2E have covered so far in 2024. See more than 2,000 technology M&A deals for 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020 listed here.
SentinelOne was founded in 2013 and is headquartered in Mountain View, California. The company, which takes an “AI-powered” approach to cybersecurity, has approximately 2,100 employees. PingSafe, founded in 2021, is based in San Francisco, California and has approximately 70 employees listed on LinkedIn.
Birth of a Unified Cloud Security Platform
PingSafe’s CNAPP, when combined with SentinelOne’s cloud workload security and cloud data security capabilities, is intended to provide customers with a fully integrated platform that drives better coverage, hygiene and automation across their entire cloud footprint, according to the companies.
So, what does SentinelOne mean by a paradigm shift to cloud security? Rather than relying on point solutions or a standalone cloud security platform, PingSafe’s CNAPP integration into SentinelOne's Singularity Platform will allow organizations to benefit from a unified security platform. This combination of technologies is intended to protect an enterprise across endpoints, identities and clouds.
As SentinelOne Chief Product and Technology Officer Ric Smith explained, “This new approach to cloud security will eliminate the need for companies to navigate the complexity of multiple-point solutions, triage and investigate with incomplete context, or pipe data between disparate data silos.
“Instead, they can comprehensively manage their entire attack surface from a single platform that, unlike legacy CNAPP and standalone providers, delivers the full context, real-time interaction and analytics needed to correlate, detect and stop multi-stage attacks in a simple, automated way.”
Building a Cloud Security Powerhouse
SentinelOne has been steadily extending its cloud security capabilities beyond cloud workload security, and the company asserts that the PingSafe acquisition accelerates this strategy. SentinelOne noted that the deal also aligns with the Singularity Unity Release strategy, announced in November 2023, to transform security operations centers.
The acquisition allows SentinelOne to offer differentiated capabilities, such as an attack surface management rules engine. The engine can run breach and attack simulation scenarios against internet-exposed cloud assets to identify how an adversary could compromise those assets.
These capabilities are in addition to core CNAPP capabilities like cloud security posture management, Kubernetes security posture management, agentless vulnerability scanning and shift-left Infrastructure as code scanning, SentinelOne said.
SentinelOne Cultivates Channel Partnerships
SentinelOne recently partnered with Stellar Cyber, a specialist in open eXtended detection and response (XDR) technology, with the purpose of eliminating threat actors’ ability to take advantage of built-in delays and blind spots that exist in security stacks.
Together, Stellar Cyber and SentinelOne are delivering a security operations solution that automates the identification of advanced threats by correlating threat signals from various data sources. Accordingly, security analysts receive the contextualized threat information they need to mitigate threats.
In another cloud-focused channel partnership, SentinelOne and Pax8 announced a multi-year agreement to help organizations secure their cloud environments. As such, SentinelOne will leverage Pax8's e-commerce platform to provide small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with a click-to-buy option for its security solutions.
MSP PSA and RMM platform provider ConnectWise also announced in late 2023 that its MDR integrates with SentinelOne's EDR.
SentinelOne Grows MSP Partner Pipeline
Sherweb, a cloud solutions provider, recently announced a partnership with SentinelOne to serve the cybersecurity needs of MSPs. SentinelOne's security stack will be available through Sherweb's marketplace in early 2024. More than 7,500 MSPs can gain access to SentinelOne's Singularity XDR platform and other endpoint protection solutions.
Other recent SentinelOne MSP partnerships include the Singularity Cloud Workload Security platform integration into the Snyk Developer Security Platform. And N-able and SentinelOne are now working together to deliver new and enhanced joint endpoint security solutions that MSPs can use to help their customers identify, respond to and recover from cyberattacks.
