Security News
Kyle Alspach
In a wide-ranging interview, SentinelOne’s Tomer Weingarten also discusses Palo Alto Networks, Wiz and the startup M&A environment—and shares the ‘best decision’ of his career.
The Case For Copying Apple
For years, Microsoft has borrowed much from Apple’s design aesthetic in its software, including the Windows 11 operating system. But the area where Microsoft actually needs to emulate Apple is on security by making its products “secure by design” in the same way that Apple has worked to do in iOS, said SentinelOne CEO Tomer Weingarten. Instead, however, Microsoft has plowed its investment dollars into “building security products and generating more revenue, instead of just improving their ecosystem,” Weingarten said Tuesday at the 2023 XChange Best of Breed Conference.
[Related: SentinelOne CEO On Microsoft’s Security Copilot: ‘It’s A Nice Chatbot’]
During the conference, hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company in Atlanta, Weingarten tackled numerous other topics during a 45-minute interview session: Why SentinelOne won’t be putting itself up for sale, how the company plans to compete with Cisco-Splunk, the status of SentinelOne’s R&D office in Israel and the potential for generative AI to improve security. The SentinelOne co-founder and CEO also discussed the differences he sees in his company’s approach compared with Palo Alto Networks, along with commenting on the now-terminated reseller partnership with cloud security firm Wiz and the startup M&A environment, which he believes has been “a bit exuberant” lately. And in terms of SentinelOne’s growth strategy, Weingarten called his long-running commitment to doing 100 percent of deals through channel partners the “best decision” of his career.
‘Systemic Risk’
Weingarten’s comments on Microsoft addressed a question that’s been generating increased debate around the cybersecurity industry: Does the tech giant’s continual stream of new vulnerabilities in Windows, Office and other widely used software products reflect a lack of responsibility by the company or not? Highlighting the contrast between Microsoft and Apple, he suggested that Microsoft could in fact be doing more around securely designing its products if it wanted to. With Microsoft, “you’re buying into something that is less secure by design than what you can get from Apple,” he said. And then on top of that, you must pay a “tax” to get better protection for the products by adding on Microsoft’s security tools, Weingarten said. Without a doubt, this approach by Microsoft poses a “systemic risk,” he said.
Weingarten’s comments coincided with Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday release, in which the company made fixes available for 104 security issues, three of which the company said were zero-day flaws that are being actively exploited. Microsoft also rolled out a new patch for a critical Exchange vulnerability after the initial fix in August was found to be insufficient.
‘We All See Through It’
During the session Tuesday, Weingarten also shared his views on one of the biggest mistakes that CEOs tend to make: “Don’t do it for the profit,” he said. “It’s not the greatest North Star. If you’re just doing stuff for profit and gain, you end up like Microsoft—where you build products just to generate more and more revenue, and you try and dress it up in a ‘do-good’ approach. But we all see through it.”
What follows is an edited and condensed portion of Weingarten’s comments from his appearance at XChange Best of Breed.
