Sourcefire developed Snort, an open source intrusion prevention system capable of real-time traffic analysis and packet logging. Snort was acquired (and is now supported) by Cisco in 2013.
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Microsoft Sentinel
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Microsoft Sentinel (formerly Azure Sentinel) is designed as a birds-eye view across the enterprise. It is presented as a security information and event management (SIEM) solution for proactive threat detection, investigation, and response.
If a colleague was looking to tighten down their network I can easily recommend Snort to them. It gives you some more peace of mind knowing that its always scanning traffic for malicious looking code. Even things your major firewalls and security hardware might miss, Snort has picked up. Its an easy recommendation for me.
We use it because when a user sees the suspicious activity on his account, Microsoft Sentinel gives alerts to the user's system and the admin system as well. When a user of one of our systems clicked a spam email, that email was trying to install a virus on our server, but Microsoft Sentinel gave an alert to the user and admin both, so that is why our team was able to fix that issue with Microsoft Sentinel very fast. However, it will not be the best option for you if your team is utilizing every feature but you are on a tight budget.
I appreciate that it keeps the data within our, what we call our, authorization boundary. The fact that the data remains within Microsoft's, I guess, walled garden if you will, is very helpful for certain compliance needs in particular.
The large library of ingestion: ability to ingest is basically as easy as I can basically get it to be most of the time. There's occasionally some vendors that it's a little bit more challenging for, but given the ease of integration for a lot of things, basically it's become one of my requirements when I am looking at other tools is how easily do they integrate with Sentinel.
I think it should include more third party integration with non microsoft products as well as with other cloud providers. These integrations should be native.
It should improve ML and AI capabilities.
I find its documentation a little bit difficult to understand at the start. So the words should be simple.
The Microsoft Azure Sentinel solution is very good and even better if you use Azure. It's easy to implement and learn how to use the tool with an intuitive and simple interface. New updates are happening to always bring new news and improve the experience and usability. The solution brings reliability as it is from a very reliable manufacturer.
For our organization, the Cisco defense in depth concept works the best. While Cisco can be made to work with other vendors, we have found the best in depth protection by integrating Cisco products for maximum visibility. We had a Barracuda Web Filter, but it was difficult to maintain when you had limited scope on what you could block, so we created a whitelist only setup which required a lot of additional manpower. This wouldn't have covered new threats with DNS spoofing and the like. Sourcefire also integrated with our anti-malware platform (Cisco AMP) for even better visibility on what may be happening on the end users workstation. We are planning on adding in Cisco ISE to complete the approach and possibly stealthwatch to cover our bases in the future. The Palo Alto gear was interesting, but it was priced far out of our range.
Well before there was Microsoft Sentinel, you had other competing products like ArcSight or Splunk, et cetera. I think they have their own qualities, but the Microsoft integration story is really why we're using it.
As any cybersecurity product, this has to be more with risk to avoid loss in case of a ransomware that more than relate to a productivity increase. Maybe the impact could be that instead of having people that are checking 24/7 the dashboard, you could implement Sentinel and have less people checking that or people with less expertise. So the saving will be a minor but will be a saving in the cost of your team.
