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
Mimecast Advanced Email Security
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
The Mimecast Secure Email Gateway is a messaging security option with anti-spam / anti-malware, data loss prevention, large file send, and other features, from UK company Mimecast.
At the time we were forced to move from McAfee because they were being purchased by Intel. We were recommended Mimecast through our reseller, and has been great ever since. Mimecast does a better job at filtering out bad "stuff", and gives you so many more options.
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.
Mimecast's advanced email security remains the number one security tool available for any organization. You will be ahead of the game before anything gets in and users start clicking. Users are often the ones who can disclose sensitive data and compromise the organization and its brand.
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.
Simplicity: Once set up, Mimecast Advanced Email Security is easy to use, intuitive, and simple. This reduces onboarding time with new employees.
Robust Audit Trail: Being able to see what happened with specific emails, why things happened, and who was responsible for them helps to reduce troubleshooting time as well as improving overall email observability.
Clean Interface: Mimecast Advanced Email Security is a Swiss-Army-Knife of email security. There are many different configurations and complex rules that can be implemented. To make this manageable Mimecast Advanced Email Security has implemented a simple and clean UI. Being able to favorite commonly used features makes a huge difference in usability.
Simple SSO Integration: This seems like a no-brainer, but its odd to see how many SaaS products either don't support SSO, or make it so complicated and convoluted that setup and maintenance becomes a fully time job.
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.
I would like to see some additional improvement around the attachment protection, specifically what may be getting caught and what types of files are attempting to be delivered via email by impersonators.
The Targeted Threat Protection is a great product, and I wish there was a dashboard for this service where we could easily see the types of emails and/or links that have been caught as part of the protection module that could be shared with executives.
Finally, I feel that the phishing protection is great and honestly don't believe there should be much improvement needed there.
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.
There is no question as to the value of the product to the business and the disruption of changing vendors would not be worth any savings possibly achieved by switching.
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.
The console is nice, but it could use some improvements for day to day activities for Admins. I find I am jumping around all over to get what I need (always searching for the right area). Being able to customize a Dashboard or having a central typical activities dashboard will be helpful to save more time.
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.
When calling them you get best in the world customer services but as previously mentioned their online community and capabilities are a bit lacking. They want you to log into their portal to see updates on issues (vs. using a public facing service) and I rarely find the answers to my issues in electronic format. Their online presence is only helpful with the simplest of issues.
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
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.
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.
In my opinion, Mimecast Advanced Email Security outpaces Microsoft in terms of usability and reduction of spam and phishing emails. Mimecast Advanced Email Security was cheaper than Proofpoint, but I suspect Proofpoint is doing better on staying current with trends than Mimecast Advanced Email Security. I think Abnormal offers the best incoming email security, but does not offer outgoing email data loss prevention or encryption, which is a key use cast for us.
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.
