AlienVault® Unified Security Management®
(USM) delivers threat detection, incident response, and compliance
management in one unified platform. It is designed to combine all the essential security
capabilities needed for effective security monitoring across cloud and
on-premises environments, including SIEM, intrusion detection, vulnerability
management, as well as continuous threat intelligence updates. The vendor states that even for resource-limited IT
security teams, AlienVault…
$1,075
per month
CrowdStrike Falcon
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
CrowdStrike offers the Falcon Endpoint Protection suite, an antivirus and endpoint protection system emphasizing threat detection, machine learning malware detection, and signature free updating. Additionally the available Falcon Spotlight module delivers vulnerability assessment with no performance impact, no additional agents, hardware, scheduled scans, firewall exceptions or admin credentials.
$59.99
per endpoint/month (minimum number of endpoints applies)
Pricing
AlienVault USM
CrowdStrike Falcon
Editions & Modules
Essentials
$1,075
per month
Standard
$1,695
per month
Premium
$2,595
per month
Falcon Go (Small Business)
$59.99
per endpoint/month (minimum number of endpoints applies)
Falcon Go (Small Business)
$59.99
Falcon Pro
$99.99
per endpoint/month (for 5-250 endpoints, billed annually)
Falcon Enterprise
$184.99
per endpoint/month (minimum number of endpoints applies)
The logs analysis is very easy to use as it uses splunk in the backend. The automated SOAR features helps to save time and response on the incidents. The threat intelligence is very up-to-date with the recent cyber attacks.
At this point I'm saying a 4. While the marketing material make it appear to be easy to use and it was relatively easy to set up, as previously mentioned, each event description is based upon the individual asset making it nearly impossible for the administrator to be a SME for each asset. For example, if one of the assets reporting is a router, the administrator monitoring alerts would need to know what the various events are that can be triggered as an event for the particular router; however, if the asset is a workstation, the administrator would need to know the various events that are triggered for workstations.
I would highly recommend CrowdStrike Falcon to any organization serious about bolstering its cybersecurity defenses. The platform's effectiveness in threat detection, proactive mitigation, and scalability make it a valuable asset in today's ever-evolving threat landscape. Despite some learning curves and integration challenges, the return on investment and the overall security enhancement justify its strong recommendation.
AlienVault USM is simple and easy to deploy. Sensors can be deployed in as little as 15 minutes through the setup wizard.
The USM UI is easy to understand. I've trained multiple analysts who are able to perform their duties on their first day, in part because of USM Anywhere's ease of use.
Top-notch built-in compliance templates and reporting features.
Personally, I've wished I could purchase a service that would configure AV for my environment. I get a lot of traffic on a daily basis and I almost need to hire an analyst that just works on AV.
Some of the filters when looking for a specific alert aren't that easy to use.
The centralized logging and retention for PCI compliance was our main driver, and it is meeting that need. Otherwise there has been enough frustration with the lack of documentation and the need to customize through the CLI that I would be open to alternatives.
Crowdstrike has a large suite of tools built for helping the engineers triage and respond to security event whenever identified. The ability to customize the security policies and implement more granular policies to different devices based on the functionality is unmatched. Crowdstrike provides so much of ability in a decent budget which ascertains the value for money or ROI.
Once you are able to navigate the different panels, finding what you need is quite easily. Before getting used it it can be a bit of challenge . Each panel is quite well laid out and the filtering search capabilities are quite strong.
I think it is a complete and very trustful XDR platform, with very few False Positives. It is very well supported by highly skilled professionals on all levels: from pre-sales engineers, Customer Account Managers and support engineers.
We do have issues with maintenance on the AlienVault USM as the disk fills up from time to time with other data sources. Sources for scanning logs and net flow data isn't calculated in regular disk maintenance and can easily fill up our disk if we do not keep an eye on it with some custom Nagios plugins. The system does properly trim logging data from logging sources properly.
With the latest release of AlienVault USM overall performance has not been an issue. We have noticed single source events per second does not scale well with the overall system. 2,000eps on a vmware system with a single source produces delays of up to an hour for us. Pages, reporting and even raw log searches are rather quick though.
The support we received from alienvault was excellent. They went above and beyond in making sure everything was working as it needed to be. They REALLY want their product implementation to be a success and our security goals be achieved. They are like a member of our security team.
Support is generally pretty fast and gets right to the issue. We haven't had to use them much, fortunately, but the issues and questions we've had are usually answered quickly. The customer success manager/account manager you're assigned will also follow up with you on a regular cadence to ensure you're getting the most out of the subscription. There's not a whole lot of room to improve, other than the general confusion about what is/what is not covered in custom packages you're subscribed to. The initial purchase took much longer because of a package name changes and realignments of different modules into those packages.
I did not have any experience with "in person" training directly. The free online classes offered for a half a day are based on the actual training offered. These little teasers are very good and well worth your time to learn a few quick and dirty ways of getting more information from your SIEM
There is limited amount of learning that can be completed in an in-person training available. In my opinion, the self-paced learning provided by Falcon portal is more useful over in-person training. The support from Falcon is great and useful to overcome difficulties, if any.
It was very well organized and helpful in using the product to the fullest extent. The instructor allowed time for folks who were involved with managed services to receive tuning tips in order to better support their customers. In addition, the course materials were automatically updated when the new version came out.
The training provided by Crowdstrike Falcon is complete in terms of the depth of technical knowledge and teaches the users about going through with the platform. There are lots of jargons for different tools that Crowdstrike Falcon has and this training teaches them all which helps in managing the platform better. Plus, the regular knowledge checks are also very helpful for the end user.
AlienVault USM was a very simple to implement and get up and running. We started with a trial version and had that up and going within an hour of receiving email instructions from the sales engineer. We never had to contact support to get the system up and going. It was extremely easy to convert over to a full license once we started with a paid version.
Splunk's ES is a paid add-on on top of an already pricey product. Finding a MSSP that supports Splunk and isn't a 6 figure annual commitment seems unlikely. LogRhythm did not have a cloud-based solution when we were considering SIEMs. Fantastic product though and have a good MSSP base. Devo did not have a MSSP partner base when we looked. Their product is fantastic too. AlienVault USM has good partners to choose from as well as an affordable cloud model, that's why we chose it.
CrowdStrike Falcon's cloud-native architecture gives it an edge in terms of scalability, ease of deployment, and real-time threat intelligence updates. The user interface of Falcon is intuitive and offers clear visibility into our organization's threat landscape. Our team felt more comfortable navigating Falcon's dashboard. CrowdStrike Falcon's API and integration capabilities meant we could easily incorporate it into our existing tech stack, enhancing our other tools. Falcon's seemed more flexible for our specific needs.
The AlienVault USM is not very scalable. Some scalability can be achieved by installing additional sensors, but this only offers 500eps per sensor and is still overall limited by the installation type of VM or physical. We have also noticed the EPS (events per second) is rated overall and not towards a single source. A single source on a very healthy VMware partition tops out at 2,000eps for us, no matter how we configure it. Maybe this is a problem of the 5.2 release?
Once you hit the 150 asset mark, you have to jump to their unlimited license. There is no middle ground. We were only 10 or so assets above the 150 so we had to chose to either not monitor those assets or pay the price of the upgrade.
AlienVault brings all the information to one place which makes it much quicker to track down problems.
