AlienVault OSSIM vs. Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention

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

Palo Alto NTP is an appropriate suite of protection for any enterprise environment or anyone that truly needs some serious perimeter protection in a one-stop, all-in-one unit. There are no modules or add-ons or clunky interfaces to deal with it; everything works out of one management plane, licensing, implementation, monitoring. updating, etc. As a network admin, that is immensely valuable to me. Additionally, I get real-time reporting on all the stuff NTP is catching, and it is nothing to shirk at. The real value in NTP comes in only after you begin doing SSL-decryption, however, to truly inspect the traffic. Short of that, you are just seeing a bunch of encrypted data and the NTP suite of tools isn't going to avail you. NTP plus decryption, though, is invaluable!

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

• Anti virus
• Vulnerability protection
• Anti spyware

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Sometimes I struggle to find the deny or specific traffic log for file blocking profile under Unified logs.
• Reporting around Threat Prevention suite could be much better.
• Possibly a specific threat prevention search function that spans across of threat features.

Incentivized

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

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

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

It is comparable but not as robust as other stand alone IPS/IDS.

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

• We have various compliance standards we have to meet and the Palo Alto with its Networks Threat Protection suite has checked off pretty much all the boxes we needed and at a price point that couldn't be easily beat for comparable features, throughput, etc.
• IT/Network staff has saved a A LOT of time using this platform for protection (coming from an ASA)

Incentivized