Why a Wiz-SentinelOne acquisition could have made sense
Providing a modern end-to-end cloud security solution
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer or any other entities with which I am affiliated.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about How Wiz fails, and coincidentally, when I was writing the article, there were rumors about Wiz acquiring SentinelOne. A week later, SentinelOne reported they were ending their strategic relationship with Wiz. There’s a lot to unpack here, and I plan to touch on some of this in this newsletter. I will also make an argument about why this partnership makes sense and why it would have been a good move to avoid a potential failure state I described in “How Wiz fails.”
As a disclaimer, I don’t have a direct financial interest in Wiz or SentinelOne, and I don’t currently use either product. I don’t have plans to initiate a financial position in the next 72 hours or buy either product in the short term.
What is Wiz and SentinelOne?
I describe a Wiz in my previous post, so I won’t go into too much detail here. Wiz is a “next-generation” cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). It first started as a cloud security posture management (CSPM) and expanded its platform to cover more parts of infrastructure security. It essentially monitors your cloud infrastructure for misconfigurations.
SentinelOne is an endpoint detection and response product. Its closest competitor is Crowdstrike, which I’ve written about in the past. The product detects malware and issues on endpoints where many breaches start. Like Crowdstrike, it also has a log management solution as part of its XDR offering. A few notable differences that will be relevant later in the newsletter:
In general, Crowdstrie is known to have a much better security services division, especially for incident response. After all, it started as primarily a services company while SentinelOne started as a product company
SentinelOne’s story around XDR and log management with its acquisition of Scalyr is stronger than that of Crowdstrike
Why would these companies want an acquisition?
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