Recently, SentinelOne (S1) experienced a major outage on their SaaS cybersecurity platform, as detailed in their own blog post: Update on May 29 Outage.
What if I told you that other major players have experienced similar outages—but their customers never even knew? Detection-based SaaS solutions often suffer from significant latency or outages that go unnoticed. This is a critical issue no one is talking about.
I’ve been meaning to document this for a while, and now that we have a clear example, here are some key questions you should be asking any Cybersecurity SaaS / MDR vendor (and frankly, this applies to any SaaS provider):
- How do they communicate incidents affecting their own platform?
- What level of visibility exists for customers when the platform is offline?
- What are their contingency plans and escalation paths?
Also consider:
- How do they monitor detection latency and delays?
- Can you leverage APIs to write your own monitoring detections, and feed them into tools like ServiceNow? basics example, download eicar file via schedule task on test machine and then see how long it takes to detect.
With S1, for example, there’s an added frustration: their platform often locks down endpoints over innocuous activity, and if access to the cloud portal is unavailable, admins have no local fallback. This single point of failure leaves customers locked out of their own systems.
I worked for SOC provider before and the level of scrutiny inside a RFP process was crazy, for MDR services, CISO just trust it! It is very interesting physiology of a buyer and incredible marketing.
Just remember there is no such thing as REAL-TIME. That is physically impossible. I worked in Investment banking and got close to Real-Time system and even they have latency, so you assume your MDR products are Real-time detections.
https://www.sentinelone.com/blog/update-on-may-29-outage
- https://www.linkedin.com/posts/maximelb_so-this-blew-my-mind-microsoft-defender-activity-7336019158809067520-dgil?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAADYqlEBFhWq_nhEp3BtPb1m0UqSgw4MxKI
- Washington D.C., March 18, 2024 —
- The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced settled charges against two investment advisers, Delphia (USA) Inc. and Global Predictions Inc., for making false and misleading statements about their purported use of artificial intelligence (AI). The firms agreed to settle the SEC’s charges and pay $400,000 in total civil penalties.
- https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024-36 “We find that Delphia and Global Predictions marketed to their clients and prospective clients that they were using AI in certain ways when, in fact, they were not,” said SEC Chair Gary Gensler. “We’ve seen time and again that when new technologies come along, they can create buzz from investors as well as false claims by those purporting to use those new technologies. Investment advisers should not mislead the public by saying they are using an AI model when they are not. Such AI washing hurts investors.”