Ivanti Security Controls vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Agentless patching is the best of all the products I've used. The real-time updates that don't require re-scanning after each step is great.

Incentivized

For IT shops that do not have much developer experience and/or need to have a robust service catalog, AAP is pretty weak. The hybrid cloud story is muddy at best and could stand to have a CI/CD pipeline-like tool that allows non-developers to create complex workflows using smaller low-code piece parts.

Incentivized

• Trusted ownership checking is a good way to implement effective basic protection.
• Patching is important today to react quickly to security problems. With Security Controls, it's easier than ever before.
• One console for whole security.

• Agentless. For our implementation, this is the single biggest factor. If we have to touch the machine and install an agent before we can start managing it, that's already too much effort and slows us down.
• Re-entrant. This is not unique to Ansible, but certainly a huge improvement over custom scripts and such. Because it's such a huge effort to make scripts re-entrant, most of our scripts did not allow an elegant way to recover on failure. Manually cleaning up the half-attempt and re-trying is still too cumbersome, and being able to just re-run Ansible is a great improvement!
• Infrastructure as code. This is new to Ansible, and there are still a few minor bugs with their AWS modules, but it's been a huge help being able to define our infrastructure in an Ansible playbook, commit it to source control, and use one tool for all our DevOps tasks.

Incentivized

• Performance of the console when using agentless machines.
• The console layout is a bit cumbersome - would be better if all functions were accessible from one screen.
• Common deployment examples to assist with deployment types.

Incentivized

• Ansible Tower is a paid service, which can be annoying at times. But that is understandable, as it requires an additional level of support from the Ansible team to develop.
• There is a decently large learning curve for someone not familiar with setting up Unix environments. However, there is a very large support community with tons of documentation, so it's not a dealbreaker.

Incentivized

We are deploying Ansible at all levels of the organization

Incentivized

the yaml is easy to write and most people can be taught to write basic playbooks in a few weeks

Incentivized

Ansible is very friendly to start with. With just a few configurations, you have full management to your servers. You can configure it and implement it in seconds. You can also set up a cron job to make sure it gets implemented. It suits our need perfectly. Support can be a bit hard.

Incentivized

Support wasn't used as the cost didn't justify the expense. We have yet to use the support.

Incentivized

There is a lot of good documentation that Ansible and Red Hat provide which should help get someone started with making Ansible useful. But once you get to more complicated scenarios, you will benefit from learning from others. I have not used Red Hat support for work with Ansible, but many of the online resources are helpful.

Incentivized

I spoke on this topic today!

Incentivized

Since we have been using Application Control for about 15 years, it is, of course, the best solution for us. We also looked at other products (RES One Workspace), but they didn't convince us. Some features of RES were good and are now part of the User Workspace Manager. The Microsoft solution seems too complicated to us and does not have the advantages of Trusted Ownership Checking.

Ansible is much easier than Puppet, more enterprises are switching from Puppet to Ansible due to ease of use. Ansible has integration modules which allow you to transition from Puppet or Chef to Ansible. IT Automation space has a CAGR of 200%+ what are you doing to not get left behind?

Incentivized

• Reduced amount of operating hours for administration of patching.

Incentivized

• Ansible has definitely helped our security team keep our servers up to date on the latest vulnerabilities through their continuous team of patch deployments.
• The time to market for our code deployments have sped up 3 fold at least and is expected to continue improving as more teams are comfortable with DevOps framework.
• Ansible is open source and free, which is great. But for an enterprise deployment, we had to budget for extra nodes as Tower only comes with licenses for 10.

Incentivized