Bitsight Third-Party Risk Management vs. SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM)

If you are considering BitSight Security Ratings as a portion or bulk of a larger vendor management project you will be well served in letting the risk scores be an indication of how closely you need to examine a vendor. However, you should not base your assessment solely on the risk score provided. The risk score is based on publicly available data and can be inaccurate.

Incentivized

Optimal for SolarWinds Security Event Manager needs for smaller companies - it is a very cool product but has some limitations around EPS (which gets chewed up quickly if you're doing it the right way & adding servers/storage/FW & other network devices)... Also pricing model is GREAT (not consumption-based, which is the greatest grift the SIEM industry has created).

Incentivized

• Security hygiene tracking over time
• Understandable risk score based on observations
• Predictability model of potential cyber security issues based on security habits.

Incentivized

• It does a great job of notifying us when accounts have been locked out. We can then find out the device on the network where the login attempt occurred.
• Searching for incidents is now a lot faster with the implementation of the HTML 5 interface.

Incentivized

• Since data is based on public registration IP and domain data can be stale depending on ISP/Domain registration update delays.
• Correcting a false detection is a month-long endeavor and requires the company with the impacted score to clean up BitSight's data.
• Customer service for incorrect data is convoluted and requires a deep understanding of domain registration to correct the data. The responsibility for correcting data is placed solely on the customer's shoulders.

Incentivized

• All SolarWinds product suffer from slow response times in management portals. SolarWinds SEM is no exception. While it is much preferred over a "thick client" there is much room for improvement in speed.
• If you use the email alert features with SolarWinds make sure to prepare you staff and team for the large amount of emails they could receive. Make sure to reduce the number of alerts so your team does not ignore the alerts.

Incentivized

It is pretty likely that we will renew SEM when the time comes up. It is easy to use and maintain so there isn't much of a need to replace this product. It is also a pretty fair price for the capabilities provided by the SEM

Incentivized

If you are familiar with SolarWinds then you can use this product it's as easy as that. If you have never used a SolarWinds product then it will take a minute to get how they do reports and make dashboards but that being said the tool is great and can make things very easy once you get a feel for how it works and get everything setup how you like it.

Incentivized

The quality of support can vary depending on whom you end up speaking with. I was fortunate enough to work with a support representative who was very familiar with the product. He had even authored some of the support documentation on the website. On the flip side, I had two other experiences where I was simply directed to online training material.

Incentivized

BitSight Security Ratings ranks evenly with SecurityScorecard and both below OneTrust for our use case. We needed a platform that would let us define risk for our organization and weight scores differently based on data sensitivity. BitSight and SecurityScorecard are aggregate data that can provide insight into the security habits of a potential vendor and should be considered as an addition to most vendor management projects. However, they both provide metrics based on hygiene and not on data-defined risk. In concert with a platform to evaluate risk based on data and to inform the overall evaluation of a vendor, BitSight Security Ratings can be made to shine. Just understand that you may have to validate some data.

Incentivized

Fortianalzyer can only do logs from FortiGate so usefulness is limited. Elasticsearch was a lot slower than Solarwinds and the filters were a lot harder to set up and use. The connectors for SEM were far more stable.

Incentivized

• Wasted resource hours cleaning up data to correct erroneous risk score.
• Extra time spent addressing calls from clients about erroneous risk score data.
• Extra time validating risk score provided by BitSight Security Ratings for potential vendors to ensure valid data.

Incentivized

• For the price, it produced a decent value. It did a lot of the easy stuff well. I can't give any specific data given the objective of the product was to monitor very basic events in the environment.
• There are free options that can do a better job.

Incentivized