AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued) vs. Proofpoint Advanced Threat Protection

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

It is great out of the box and uses AI and machine learning to identify threats with minimal input. It does need to be configured and tuned to meet the needs of the organisation. Industry specific software that sends or receives emails may be affected by this product.

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

• Spam filtering.
• Automatic retrieval of malicious emails that have gotten through the filter but were later detected using sample data across all the organizations Proofpoint has as customers.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• With our current setup we need to add new users manually.
• Reports aren't that intuitive.
• Mailboxes have to be removed manually.

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

Proofpoint offers a lot of products, but they are not particularly well integrated. They all look different, and there is no central location to access them all from, which is disappointing. However, I do know they have a big push for upgrading the UI and usability, so this should improve in the coming months I hope.

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

Even though the product is good, the support can be lacking at times. The support needs to know their product inside and out, but there are times in which we figure out things before their support does. I feel as if we should not be able to fix issues that their support cant fix, hence the main reason for support.

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

Proofpoint's Advanced Threat Protection, in the past, has identified threats whereby Microsoft's Advanced Threat Protection did not.

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

• PP blocks 5-10 emails per day which are spam or malicious
• I only get a small number of emails per week which are spam
• The only malicious emails I receive are from our internal security team which bypasses the PP threat protection

Incentivized