Finding Protection and Compliance
E INC hosts a significant amount of critical data, including thousands of vehicle identification numbers (VIN), driver’s licenses, and purchase details. Guilherme Blanco, Vice President of Infrastructure & IT at EBlock, needed an evolved cybersecurity solution for endpoint protection, threat detection, and automatic response capabilities—all while reducing human intervention.
“We needed to build different layers of security, especially because we have both virtual and on-premises cloud-based persistence,” Blanco says. “E INC runs virtual and physical auctions, and very soon we realized the necessity of having a solid Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) and Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solution in place in order to mitigate problems proactively.”
The company needs to protect itself from many cyber threats. From social engineering to ransomware, E INC also deals with critical Personal Identifiable Information (PII) issues that increase the risk of identity theft through data breaches and insecure storage. It also faces stringent data privacy laws such as CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), which regulates how businesses collect or process personal information of Californian residents.
E INC also wanted to strengthen its cybersecurity posture. “We were establishing a mobile device management solution, but we didn’t have the ability to prevent issues among users outside our premises,” says Max Guerra, Director of Cybersecurity & CISO at EBlock. “If you’re not in an office space, you’re not in a controlled environment. With the tools we had in-house at the time, we could not protect those devices outside.”
Letting AI Do the Job
Blanco and his team needed an innovative, reliable, easy-to-use, and fast-to-implement solution. He says, “I didn’t want to waste time; I had to roll out a solution for 1,000 endpoints within a month. If it took a vendor two weeks to show me a screenshot of their application, then they’re out. It was really tough to find a vendor that could actually fulfill all our requirements.”
E INC also relied on its partner, Amazon Web Services (AWS), for guidance. AWS answered: “Just install SentinelOne across all the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances.” Blanco adds, “Amazon was a good partner because they helped us choose SentinelOne instead of an antivirus, which we also considered. It was good to realize that we needed something better that could actually prevent real-time incidents.”
SentinelOne’s configuration and ease of use were exactly what E INC sought. “You can either have a team of specialists onsite or rely on behavioral artificial intelligence (AI) to do most of the work for you. Instead of having to manually set the rules to prevent attacks, we rely on a trained model,” Guerra says.
Comprehensive Singularity to Increase Visibility
E INC initially rolled out Singularity Endpoint. As a result, the company improved threat detection and incident response capabilities across critical endpoints. Blanco’s team reduced the time needed to detect and respond to security breaches and gained greater visibility in monitoring endpoint activity.
When the company transitioned to remote work, Blanco equipped employees with laptops and other devices. Singularity Network Discovery helped E INC track those devices within its network. “We now have a clear view of our inventory. We are protected against threats and continuously tracking the devices in and outside our network,” Blanco explains.
The company also implemented SentinelOne Singularity XDR for greater visibility in identifying attacks. Blanco can also trace authentications happening in its Google Workspace and Amazon stack to discern whether they constitute a potential security threat. “Adoption was very easy once we already had the mobile device management software (MDM) in place. The whole rollout—and especially that of the cloud—was easy and super fast, with just patch management support.”
Peace of Mind and Ease of Use
E INC has greatly improved its cybersecurity posture to run a successful car dealership business both online and offline. “After implementing and integrating SentinelOne solutions with Slack, I receive alerts almost in no time and execute actions right away. I click on the link that comes through on Slack and boom!” Guerra says. “SentinelOne gives me peace of mind because I don’t have to constantly check for threats all the time. Everything happens automatically.”
With the visibility that SentinelOne solutions offer, Blanco confidently identifies threats. “In the past, I couldn’t provide answers about endpoints just because I just didn’t have any visibility.”
Furthering an AI-Powered Cybersecurity Strategy
E INC’s next step: to deploy Purple AI and integrate it into its SaaS solutions. The company will continue its partnership with SentinelOne to create even better results. Guerra says, “We want to boost our detection capabilities and build up on the convenient, sophisticated alert system that we now have.”
