For the lean IT team at South Texas College, the move to SentinelOne means fewer complaints from end users, security they can trust, and 20-30 hours back every week — thanks to autonomous, AI-powered endpoint defense.
Safeguarding Data for 34,000 Students
For those charged with information security at South Texas College, it’s more than a job. It’s safeguarding their family, community, and home away from home.
“I’ve been working for this institution for the past 22 years,” said Francisco Peña, Information Security Analyst. He started as a work-study student and teams daily with fellow alum Luis González, Chief Information Security Officer and a two-decade veteran of the IT team.
With 34,000 enrolled, the public college propels students throughout the region into meaningful careers with more than 130 degrees and certificate programs, including five bachelor’s degrees. They must safeguard sensitive student data from ever more sophisticated attacks. But like many schools, South Texas College’s legacy endpoint product failed to protect them from novel and evolving attacks — and increased the workload for the team by prompting most of the IT service tickets.
That’s why the college turned to SentinelOne for autonomous, AI-driven threat detection and response that erases blind spots, slashes customer complaints by 80%, and frees them to focus on more of what matters.
SentinelOne: Highest Scores in Head-to-Head Testing
In recent years, the college had depended on an endpoint protection product that, frankly, could no longer keep pace.
“Our previous endpoint solution showed green check marks for everything, but we actually had malware it wasn’t detecting,” Peña said. “We needed to address increasingly sophisticated cyber threats and streamline management.”
Layers of agents bogged down system performance, slowed time-sensitive processes such as student services, and triggered most of the IT team’s service tickets.
In the hunt for an alternative, they tested the leaders in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant against the legacy solution. Across 100 endpoints over 90 days, SentinelOne came out the clear winner.
SentinelOne passed where other solutions fell short: automation and AI, a small agent footprint with no impact on performance, zero-day protection, comprehensive reporting, a high level of support, and coverage for every type of endpoint.
Most critically, SentinelOne surfaced malware and spyware that other solutions missed.
“SentinelOne delivers real-time detection, automated response, and rapid recovery that reduces our risk of downtime and data breaches,” Peña said. “It’s been a transformative leap in our cybersecurity maturity with AI-powered, autonomous protection that safeguards over 10,000 devices and the safety and security of our critical data.”
Endpoint Security: Less Complex, More Secure
The college rolled out SentinelOne Singularity™ Endpoint across all devices in a move that was smooth and low lift on the team, and expedited by carrying over the tenant and configurations from the proof of concept and with guidance from SentinelOne.
Now, they take advantage of everything the endpoint solution offers, including AI-powered automation to find and address threats.
“SentinelOne brings automation we didn’t have before,” Peña said. “It detects, responds, quarantines, and brings systems back online or flags issues for further investigation. We have a cleaner, more secure environment, and endpoint management is less complex.”
Given strict data protection and compliance standards in higher education — like FERPA, PCI-DSS, GLBA, and state requirements — the college gains multiple layers of defense via one agent that doesn’t slow systems. “Now, we protect 10,000 endpoints with a single, lightweight agent that delivers multiple advanced security capabilities — without negatively impacting system performance, Peña said.”
Next, the college looks forward to rolling out Purple AI to surface the biggest threats, analyze signals, and prioritize alerts.
20-30 Hours/Week Reclaimed
For South Texas College, the shift to Singularity Endpoint has been a force multiplier:
- 80% fewer service tickets related to endpoint slowdowns
- Per-incident resolution time down from a full day to 30 minutes
- 20-30 hours a week reclaimed across the team, from installation to configurations to troubleshooting
The team now focuses on compliance demands and expanding their cybersecurity awareness for students and employees with fun tabletop exercises and escape rooms. Most importantly, there’s more confidence and less worry as they protect the community that trusts them to do so.
“We feel peace of mind knowing we have SentinelOne behind us,” Peña said. “It’s transformed our day-to-day operations by streamlining endpoint protection, improving efficiency, and reducing the operational burden of our IT and security teams.”
