AlienVault OSSIM vs. Microsoft 365 Business Premium

If this is your first experience with a SIEM, this one can get you started. Take the time to learn the ins and outs of the product and you'll most likely be satisfied with it if your company is an SMB. If you need compliance reports, OSSIM is too small for you, you'll need to go with USM or USM Anywhere.

Incentivized

Well-Suited Scenarios:Collaborative Work Environment:Scenario: Your organization relies heavily on collaboration, and you need a platform that integrates email, chat, document sharing, and online meetings seamlessly.Usage: Microsoft 365 Business Premium provides tools like Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive, fostering a collaborative work environment.Professional Communication:Scenario: Your business requires professional email communication with a custom domain, and you need advanced email security features.Usage: Microsoft 365 includes Exchange Online for business-class email, with features like anti-malware and anti-spam protection.Document Management and Sharing:Scenario: You have a need for centralized document storage, version control, and secure sharing within and outside the organization.Usage: OneDrive for Business and SharePoint allow for secure document storage, versioning, and controlled access to files.

Incentivized

• Asset discovery. Once installed in a centric, network-accessible server, OSSIM can poll all your endpoints with common protocols (SSH, SNMP, WMI) to detect and discover site-wide assets to monitor. You only need to group them by your own criteria once added to the product.
• SIEM Event Correlation. You can define quite complex correlation rules to detect possible suspicious or malicious actions or attempts in your network, in order to categorize them as real threats or as false positives, thus streamlining your risk assessment and management.
• Ease of installation. The entire AlienVault OSSIM is self-contained in an ISO file, which can be burned into a DVD or just mounted in your server of choice (physical or virtual) for deployment. The installation process is automated and quote verbosed, with options for static IP, email messaging and others.
• Ease of access. Being AlienVault OSSIM a self-contained appliance, it can be accessed via web by any device that supports a web browser, being that desktops, workstation, mobile devices, etc. The OSSIM dashboard and other features are automatically rearranged to adapt to the particular device being in use.

Incentivized

• Work in sync in different departments.
• Being able to work from any device or computer. It is a very noble tool in different devices.
• The work between the different programs (Word, Excel, Notes) that it offers is extremely light and good.

Incentivized

• Creating custom rules is a bit complicated
• Reporting could be improved
• Agent has caused conflicts with a couple of our other applications

Incentivized

• The only thing that is a bit cumbersome is that it doesn't seem that you can save files directly to programs like one drive if you aren't using a Microsoft program to generate the document. An example of this would be if I am working in a PDF in our PDF Program I have to first save it to my desktop and then drag it into one drive. I end up with duplicates and that can sometimes make it hard to remember which is the most up-to-date.

Incentivized

It is part of the organisation now. It provides and rich feature set and requires a relatively low amount of administration.

AlienVault OSSIM is far easy to use and manage - provided you know what you're doing. As any SIEM application, there is some background knowledge required in order to take advantage of the product's functionalities, such as the log correlation and analysis. Other than that, the application is quite usable and robust.

Incentivized

The basic apps are straightforward and easy to use, especially since they have been around so long. I'm referring to the basic apps like Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, OneNote, etc. Other features such as Microsoft Teams and Sharepoint Sites, Sharepoint Lists, Sharepoint Groups, etc. all require a higher level of knowledge to both implement and use properly

Incentivized

In the last 5 years, Microsoft has come a long way. The performance of the products has become more and more user-friendly and it seems that the feedback provided by the user community is being listened to and worked on. The processes are very fast and seamless. There are negligible errors and doesn't slow the systems down.

Incentivized

Everything is done through MSSP and installation pro services. Once those hours are burned up, then you're on your own without a lot of help. Typically the pro services hours aren't enough to get past 60 days and MSSP are hit and miss. We had a miss for installation helpers.

Incentivized

As mentioned elsewhere in the review, Microsoft has historically paid attention to community feedback and issues, but timeliness can improve, and so can the addressing of long-standing issues about which many users have said "I have this issue too!" but no official solution exists. For issues that do have a solution, however, the solution is usually not difficult to find, and the explanation of features on Microsoft's website can mitigate many problems.

Incentivized

Originally my organization leveraged alien value due to the lower cost of entry and ability to manage it as a service provider. Unfortunately, after several years of working with this tool, it became unwieldy to use as it felt that almost every useful report had to be created by hand. As other tools have come out with the ability to do automated responses such as Stellar Data processor, we have begun to evaluate alternatives.

Incentivized

Before migrating to Microsoft 365 Business Premium, we possessed an in-house exchange server. Therefore, it was difficult for us to look at alternatives to Microsoft for a solution – we did look at the Google Suite of products, but the transition for us seemed less cumbersome to stay with Microsoft from a staff and administrative perspective. While the G Suite does offer us many outstanding products and services, we also didn’t feel that Gmail is up-to-par as a corporate solution the way Exchange/Outlook/OWA are – this alone was also a driving force for our end-users, as there was minimal transition for them to move from an on-premise solution to an off-premise solution. The additional features of SharePoint, Teams, Project, and so many other applications within Microsoft 365 also helped us make a strong case to stay with Microsoft and expand what we were using. The end-user and mobile protections of InTune have also put us at ease when issuing laptops and mobile phones to an almost fully-remote end-user base.

Incentivized

• It satisfied a requirement of our audit team (internal and external).
• Custom written alerts allow us to be proactive for some events.
• Stable product means we don't spend a lot of time keeping it up and running.

Incentivized

• Teams has streamlined our chats within each department so its easy to help out each other when problems or issues arise as well as having chat conversations in real time instead of the slower email option. This is especially handy when peopel are not working in the same space and cannot use a phone.
• All of our major communications, are done through Outlook email keeping everyone on the same page of issues within our organization or updates coming out for example
• Excel provides a simple system for creating our schedules, Tracking customer issues, project boards etc. having all these readily available minimizes time spent looking for information and grants more time for customer interaction and increasing service and sales.

Incentivized