Facing 5,000 alerts daily, Halton District School Board’s lean security team traded reactive, manual operations for autonomous security. By scaling SentinelOne across 11,000 staff and 100+ schools, they shrunk investigation times from a full day to one hour and eliminated seven days of manual work every month.
Midnight Validation: From Reactive to Autonomous Control
An after-hours attack is what keeps most cybersecurity leaders awake at night. For the team at Halton District School Board (HDSB), a late-night breach became the ultimate proof that their shift to SentinelOne’s autonomous security was working.
The threat began when an attacker gained access to a district server and deployed a web shell, enabling remote command execution. The situation could have escalated quickly.
Instead, Singularity Endpoint detected the malicious behavior immediately. Simultaneously, Wayfinder MDR analysts launched a real-time investigation, building a detailed forensic report and alerting the HDSB team before the threat could move laterally across the network.
Within minutes, the compromised server was isolated, the web shell neutralized, and the entire attack documented.
“When we had a serious issue, Wayfinder MDR saw it, built the report, called us, and we were able to shut it down within minutes,” said Mike Gregory, Cybersecurity Specialist at HDSB. “This is exactly what we wanted to happen. Wayfinder MDR was a lifesaver.”
For the small security team protecting the data of nearly 100,000 students and staff, the incident marked a clear turning point. Security had shifted from reactive to a controlled, coordinated, and autonomous operation
Fragmented Tools That Could Not Keep Pace
Protecting more than 100 schools across southwestern Ontario is a massive logistical challenge, but for HDSB, the real threat was a fragmented security stack. Before SentinelOne, the team navigated a maze of disconnected administrative consoles, sifting through thousands of alerts and manually stitching together logs from disparate systems.
As ransomware campaigns, credential theft, web shells, phishing attempts, and infrastructure compromise grew more sophisticated, this approach reached a breaking point. Compliance pressures at both provincial and national levels only raised the stakes.
Investigations into “background noise” could consume half a day or more and the district was left vulnerable during high-risk, after-hours windows. HDSB solved this by consolidating its defense into a single, integrated architecture. By unifying endpoint protection, third-party data, AI-driven investigations, and Wayfinder MDR through SentinelOne’s Singularity Platform, they replaced manual labor with automated intelligence.
“We chose SentinelOne because it’s more holistic than other solutions,” said Sean Clark, Manager of Information Security. “And with their support and responsiveness during the proof of concept, it became obvious early on that we were dealing with a partner, not a vendor.
From 5,000 Alerts/Day to 5: Achieving Autonomous Scales
Instead of the manual configuration required by legacy tools, HDSB extended SentinelOne’s protection across thousands of endpoints with unprecedented speed.
“We onboarded the data center in hours, 99% of critical assets in a day, and the entire infrastructure within a week,” said Mike Gregory.
With Singularity Endpoint active, the team immediately shifted from manual triage to autonomous remediation. Instead of fielding approximately 5,000 alerts per day, they now receive fewer than five actionable alerts daily. Mean time to detect (MTTD) has dropped to near real time, while automated containment executes in seconds.
Because all endpoint telemetry is centralized and automatically correlated, analysts begin investigations with context, shrinking the time from a full day to about an hour.
“When I looked at our alert timeline, I saw that SentinelOne detected and killed an issue instantly, and within three minutes, notified us and updated the ticket,” said Mike Gregory.
Beyond the Endpoint: Unified Visibility with AI SIEM
While endpoint protection is the foundation, HDSB further strengthened its ability to scale by consolidating all third-party data into a single, queryable data layer with SentinelOne AI SIEM.
“Before Purple AI, we had to know each tool’s specific language,” Mike Gregory said. “Now, all the logs come into one place and we can run queries with one language. When we had a breach in a router, SentinelOne notified us days before the vendor did because of detections in AI SIEM.”
By unifying cross-environment activity into a single language, the team can create custom detections and correlate telemetry well beyond the endpoint
Buying Back Time: Saving Seven Days Every Month
With Singularity Hyperautomation, HDSB has successfully “bought back” an entire week of productivity every month. By connecting SaaS platforms, Azure services, and on-premises security tools through no-code API integrations, the board orchestrates complex workflows that once required hours of manual work.
HDSB built Hyperautomation workflows that now evaluate authentication context, enrich activity with threat intelligence, and automatically remediate compromised credentials in real time. Instead of an analyst manually reviewing MFA validation or password changes, the system handles it autonomously in seconds.
“I can call pretty much anything with an API from Hyperautomation,” Mike said. “We’re automating about 100 risky logins a month, saving us seven days of manual work.”
By offloading repetitive, high-volume tasks to Hyperautomation, HDSB frees up time to focus on new systems and initiatives that strengthen its security posture, allowing it to scale without increasing headcount as it evolves into a modern SOC.
Shrinking Investigation Time with Purple AI
Accelerating investigations, Purple AI enables natural-language queries and AI-generated summaries that explain the storyline behind an alert. Rather than manually correlating logs across systems, analysts describe what they are looking for and receive contextualized results immediately. This shifts the team’s energy away from searching for data and toward making informed decisions.
“Before, I’d spend half a day or more trying to figure out where to start with an investigation,” recalled Andrew Wood, Cybersecurity Specialist. “With Purple AI, I have context and answers right away, bringing the time down to about an hour.”
By their estimates, Purple AI streamlines the most labor-intensive parts of the SOC workflow, amplifying the work of Level 1 SOC analysts.
A Security Partner for the Long Term
What began as a search for improved endpoint protection evolved into a fully integrated, autonomous architecture designed to scale. From proof of concept to critical incident response and ongoing collaboration, Halton District School Board views SentinelOne as a seamless extension of its team.
By providing 24/7 protection when the district is off the clock and playbooks to uplevel internal processes, the partnership has shifted HDSB’s posture from defensive to proactive. SentinelOne brings peace of mind that the team is doing everything possible to safeguard the sensitive student and employee data entrusted to them.
“SentinelOne is a partner, not just a vendor,” said Sean Clark “They’re going to stand behind us when we need it most. That’s what helps me sleep at night.”
About Halton District School Board
The Halton District School Board (HDSB) is one of the largest English-language public school boards in Ontario, Canada, serving the communities of Burlington, Halton Hills, Milton, and Oakville. HDSB operates more than 100 elementary and secondary schools and provides education to approximately 67,000 students, supported by more than 11,000 staff. The board is committed to academic excellence, student well-being, and safeguarding the personal information entrusted to it by families across the region.
