AlienVault OSSIM vs. SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)

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

Our customer base is SMB so I can not speak about a larger customer base or organization. I have customers with 3 end points behind the SW and customers with 200 end points behind the SW. The biggest confusion on selection is the WAN / LAN throughput. Once you understand the limitations and select the correct product I have been happy with the product on a wide range of customers. It is a bit pricey for a small operation but if they are handling sensitive data it is very cost effective.

• 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

• Filters and prevents phishing attacks
• Filters and prevents malicious attachments
• Provides quantitative reporting

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

Incentivized

• Sorry, I am very satisfied with the product, nothing I need to change

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

Support from SW is superior. End of discussion. Fortinet support was lacking in product knowledge and was noting but reading from a script. SW, if the T1 can not answer I get to T2 immediately. Never an issue to get a resolution in minutes, not hours or days. The staff knows their limits and escalates without question.

• 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

• I trust the product to protect my customer base.
• They do not differentiate themselves very well. It is a difficult sell cycle.