Likelihood to Recommend Cisco ASA's are great for internal network connected access between a firewall and the central management server. And, for complex networks where high security requirements with overly strict compliance are necessary. For networks with limited connectivity to the core or for poor network connectivity these are not the best solution. There are other more stand-alone firewall's that do this better. These firewall's are a little more complex to set up to start with so significant knowledge of these devices is required to set them up and ensure they are best practice installed.
Read full review LogRhythm is good for providing a comprehensive view of the environment. It gives a great outline of whatever is going on in our servers and systems regarding security malfunctions. The SIEM sends real-time notifications when there are some occurrences; like creating a new user and inappropriate login attempts. It also avails a good use case that meets our HIPAA compliance.
Read full review Pros ASA is our VPN concentrator. The client and server are very stable and very easy to use ASA also offers Intrusion Prevention, to an extent. This is also very useful for an improved security posture for a small company ASA allowed us to scale very quickly. We could onboard clients, partners, and consultants and give them a great onboarding experience as well Administrative costs with ASA are low. It's very easy to administer. Read full review LogRhythm NextGen SIEM Platform has an alarm system that generates tickets based on the event and the way it has been configured in the LogRhythm console. Let's say we have a ticket for a malicious email attachment. The ticket will some information like the source of the log, the source IP, destination IP etc. It can be drilled down to obtain specific information like the recipient, source location, file attachment name, SHA hash of the file, source and destination port, time, mac address of the machine that downloaded it etc. This helps the analysts to go to the root of the cause and take actions easily without manually parsing them. The second good thing about the LogRhythm NextGen SIEM Platform is that it is very easy to use with its well-structured interface. To use LogRhythm, an user barely require any technical skills. A little overview of IP, CIDR, hash, etc. is enough to get your hands on it. It requires no programming or coding skills, as everything is GUI based. It also provides a beautiful visualization dashboard. There is another beautiful feature that it provides for the classification of events, known as cases. Multiple users working on the same platform can create cases and add events to it. They also help to maintain future reference. The third good feature is the search tool which is very powerful. For example, sometimes it is hard to find the users who downloaded a malware from the guest wireless of the institution and not the private network. The search tool helps us in searching the user by automatically correlating the MAC address from the current network logs and the previous logs as the MAC address is the same. It is highly scalable for parsing a large number of logs from various sources. I particularly think this is one of the best software available for log parsing in an organization where non-technical users are working on incident response. This tool has a good amount of flexibility. However, it can only be configured with the LogRhythm NextGen SIEM Platform Console. In terms of usability, as already mentioned, it is a very easy tool to use, with a GUI based interface. Read full review Cons The ASDM software is at times a nightmare to install because of different java versions[.] [The firewall] could do with a power button, just to be able to do a hard reboot when needed[.] It would be nice to manage the firewall via the web on port 443[.] Read full review LogRhythm absolutely needs to provide back end support for threat intelligence lists. Performing a linear search on massive lists of IPs on incoming web traffic can bring the SIEM to its knees. LogRhythm should drop its entire code base for implementing lists and simply turn them into hash tables to avoid the excessive cost associated with referencing lists in rules. I haven't seen the code, but the performance suggests O(n). The reporting feature is the worst of all SIEMs, luckily reports are not my primary service offering. LogRhythm should definitely revamp its reporting to be more intuitive. Read full review Likelihood to Renew To be honest there has been now great products out in the market compared to Cisco ASA. I beleieve Cisco has to do a lot of improvement in this area. The other defeiniete factors is the cost when it comes to renewals which is always a premium on Cisco products
Read full review LogRhythm is focused on SIEM. That is their core business. Cost of operations, feature set and ease of use. The Log Rhythm support team is outstanding. Overall reliability is good. Reporting module needs some improvement and LR is promising that there will be significant improvements in future releases.
Read full review Usability LogRhythm does a rather decent job of making the functionality advanced (allowing for advanced keyword & field searching, use of "AND" as well as "OR" statements in the search bar) while keeping it accessible (by not requiring a specific syntax to do quick searches). This combined with a user interface that has headings and labels that are intuitive is very helpful.
Read full review Reliability and Availability I generally have not noticed the outages, however since it's a machine it can malfunction, we need to implement the firewall infrastructure in such a way that it is highly available with device failure, region failure etc. Else any solution will be having the issues if they are not build with resiliency.
Read full review Support Rating The support is usually very good and gets back to you very quickly. However I had some instances of when two engineers will give me wildly different answers to what I thought was a simple question. Overall however I do rate the support highly and they are generally always very good.
Read full review While LogRhythm support is generally quick to respond, the initial response is usually from a first line support engineer with general knowledge of the product. Any advanced or complex issues have always required the assistance of a higher tier of support, directly or indirectly. For a few occasions we actually used our PS hours to work on the issue.
Read full review Implementation Rating It was quite a good one, how ever requires an expertise to deploy hence the SMB segment would be finding it difficult to implement this product. The one good reason is that there are lot of ASA certified engineers in compared to the other certified engineers. Hence this resembles positively on the deployment as you have quite a lot of experienced engineer on your deployment
Read full review Buy professional services. Buy and implement the system if possible. Remember that the end point log configuration may require other teams in your company to assist you in getting the desired logs from all resources. Attend the end user and daily operations training after a period of usage so you are not overwhelmed with information on concepts not yet seen. Don't be afraid to call for help during your first months of use. Don't close any ticket until you are sure the expected results are verified. Use the community forums to discuss issues with your peers. Watch the training videos offered by L R University. Read full review Alternatives Considered We were using [
pfSense ] before in our environment but we regularly facing difficulties over it due to software bugs & downtime. After implementing Cisco ASA, it resolved our availability issue & provides us a reliable solution with the best security features & easy to understand GUI.
Read full review LogRhythm was simpler to set up and configure as well as extract information from. It also was less intrusive in terms of how many appliances were needed to implement. We were up and running within 5 hours to start accepting log sources. We selected LogRhythm as well since support is based in the USA in Colorado.
Read full review Return on Investment Most network engineers have worked with ASA, so there is no need for re-training when adding or turning over staff Current configs from older devices plug in easily, and are operational on larger devices if an upgrade is required Many support options available Read full review The ability to search through logs in a centralized location really helps us to provide RCA (Root Cause Analysis) to management for outages. This helps us to quickly identify the cause of outages and thus saves money due to reduced downtime. Being able to configure the alarms to provide real-time notification (and responses) to security events helps to prevent potential loss due to compromises (such as a fraudulent wire transfer). The initial investment in LogRhythm SIEM is somewhat expensive, however, the appliance is built to your specific needs so you won't have to constantly be upgrading the device as your company grows. Read full review ScreenShots