The Need for Speed — On and Off the Track
In Formula One racing, precision, speed, and foresight steer success — on the track, in the pit, and behind the scenes.
The same goals drive those who protect the Aston Martin Aramco Formula One™ Team against cybersecurity threats that could slow their well-oiled racing operation.
Data fuels it all — from the track to cars to the headquarters. That’s why preserving availability ranks at the top of the priority list for the cybersecurity team.
“Being able to take all that data, all those signals — like on a race car — sifting through all that data, and really quickly make a decision whether something is malicious or not is absolutely key for us as a business to protect ourselves,” explains Mark Carter, Chief Architect & Cybersecurity Officer at Aston Martin Aramco Formula One.
Seeing Around the Next Curve
The team’s headquarters sit in Silverstone, UK, next to the famed Silverstone Circuit track. There, they test car performance in a state-of-the-art wind tunnel and simulator before going up against 20 cars at 200mph.
For each race, 24 times a year, they must stand up full operations at temporary sites. Their security has to extend globally without getting in the way.
“Whatever we run trackside has to be efficient,” Carter says. “It has to be performant and it has to be resilient to make sure it doesn’t interfere with race day operations.”
That’s why the Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team turned to SentinelOne for the foresight and speed to prevent and resolve threats.
“We looked at our cybersecurity strategy, the roadmap where we wanted to go, and the target architecture we wanted to build,” Carter says. “We then engaged SentinelOne.
They really helped us look at the capabilities of the platform and how they overlap with our strategy and where we’re looking to go.”
All Assets — Protected in One Cybersecurity Platform
The team secures endpoints, identity, and cloud assets with SentinelOne Singularity, the first AI security platform to provide enterprise-wide visibility and protection.
With a single platform, they can identify threats in real time, enabling fast detection and automated or single-click resolution of security issues.
“We can take data from different types of security tooling, whether it’s a firewall or on NetApp files, and can pull all that into one place and ask it a question that aggregates across all those data sources and gives us the information really quickly,” Carter says.
The team also gains a clearer understanding of user behavior, drawing on rich analytics that help determine whether threats are internal or external.
Detecting Security Threats with AI
With SentinelOne Purple AI, the team relies on AI to help detect and respond to threats faster and stay ahead of attacks. The team automatically creates custom security playbooks with step-by-step response workflows for incidents like ransomware or suspicious user access.
AI also helps them decide on and enforce security policies. “If we’re going to look to make changes to policy, we can use Purple AI to understand the impacts that might have on the business,” Carter explains. “And then how we might roll out that change to make sure we’ve got good cyber hygiene across the company. The fact that we have all that data in one platform that we can quickly analyze and make decisions is a real game changer for us.”
The racing organization also stays ahead of identity threats with SentinelOne providing proactive, intelligent, and real-time defense for its identity infrastructure. That means reduced risk, and speedier detection and response.
An Extension of the Team
The Formula One team is backed by personalized 24×7 threat hunting services and expert analysis with SentinelOne WatchTower — boosting their capacity to find threats.
“It’s having that third-party security analyst supporting us globally, looking at our data, looking at the different indicators of compromise, looking at the potential threats out there in the wild, and then alerting us if there’s something that we need to respond to,” Carter says.
“Using SentinelOne capabilities in one platform has really reduced the amount of skills and training we need across the team, so they haven’t got to learn different sorts of tool sets,” Carter adds. “That simplifies that complexity into one tool set and makes it really easy and quick to bring people on board.”
For Carter and the team, SentinelOne’s partnership goes well beyond the technology to day-to-day support to fine-tuning capabilities to ensuring the product roadmap meets their future needs.
Singularity ultimately gives the team speed and visibility that puts threats in the rear-view mirror.
“I’ve got a really small cybersecurity team, so having a trusted partner who can support us on our cybersecurity journey is absolutely crucial,” Carter says. “The extra support that we’ve had has been crucial for us to deliver on our security roadmap quickly and efficiently.”
