The LevelBlue USM Anywhere XDR platform (replacing the former AlienVault USM) delivers threat detection, incident response, and compliance management.
$1,075
per month
Microsoft Defender XDR
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft 365 Defender combines SIEM and XDR capabilities for Microsoft 365 environments, encompassing threat detection, post-breach detection, automated investigation, and response for endpoints. Additionally, it protects cloud apps, emails and documents, and employee identities.
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.
Microsoft Defender XDR is well suited for organizations already invested in the Microsoft Ecosystem - including Microsoft 365, Azure Ad and INTune. For example, in scenarios where you need to correlament the fishing attacks with the closing point behavior and identity agreement, Microsoft Defender XDR does a big task of sewing the timeline of a full attack simultaneously and even automatically removing. This hybrid function is also ideal for the environment, where safety visibility in distance tools, cloud apps and email is important. Microsoft Defender XDR provides centralized insight and response in all these domains without the requirement of many devices. However, it is less suitable in the atmosphere with diverse or non-microsoft infrastructure, such as an organization running a mixture of Linux server, Google work area or third-party EDR tools. Cross-platform support is still developing, and integration of the microsoft ecosystem often requires additional configurations or third-party connectors. For companies of that situation, Microsoft Defender XDR cannot give its full value from the XDR box.
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.
The software uses advanced AI and machine learning algorithms to monitor activities and detect any anomalies immediately, protecting our financial data.
Automated responses to known threats reduce the impact of possible incidents and improve our security posture.
Microsoft 365 Defender easily combines with other Microsoft 365 services and external security solutions, providing a complete and unified security solution.
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.
Improved algorithms to minimize false positives in threat detection, reducing the impact on security teams and preventing unnecessary investigations into non-threatening incidents.
Advanced User-Friendly Interface:
Streamlined and intuitive user interface for the centralized dashboard, making it more accessible for security professionals with varying levels of expertise.
Greater Third-Party Integration:
Increased compatibility and integration capabilities with a broader range of third-party security tools
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.
We are pleased with the product and have no plans to look for alternatives. We are deeply invested in Microsoft ecosystem and Defender XDR provides seamless integration to other Microsoft products. For academic institution pricing is also quite affordable. In the contrary, we hope to extend the scope of the product for our entire environment.
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.
Overall the UI is modern and OK to use. Attack story is quite nice visual of incident. Advanced hunting supports autocomplete so that helps doing KQL-queries efficiently. The product is quite comprehensive and one can get lost in the vast UI. Learning curve is quite high and navigation is complex. As product also continues to evolve the UI might change somewhat.
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.
In our experience there has been very little downtime for Microsot Defender XDR. For us there hasn’t been any single incident where we needed the product and it was not available.
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.
Most of the time the product is as responsive as you might expect from cloud product. Occasionly the product is little slugish, this has been at most a slight irritation. Reports generate quickly ennough for our needs. We also not have found that Defender XDR slows down systems that it is integrated with
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.
Their support throughout our onboarding of the product was fabulous. They not only took the time to carefully explain to teams not as well equipped with the lingo but explained to the tech team how to teach the other teams to be successful. They never once seemed impatient or annoyed with basic questions and didn’t pretend to know something when they needed to research an answer
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.
Microsoft Provides a good training for the Microsoft 365 Defender and has a good learning paths to learn and take the exams and get your Certifications.
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.
seemless and almost transparent. can be deployed by script if needed so every endpoint on our system get's it. if you have intune it gets dumped on the the endpoint by policy so nothing escapes it
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.
Our product in that area, for instance as a security platform and for us it is for the moment really bad point. We started to move in that direction that there is that disconnect from the client management. So if there is some action that needs to be executed detected by security team, there is not an easy way to make that available to the team that is responsible for managing the identities as users, as the devices
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?
Azure cloud provides techical power to scale the product for whole organization. From organizational point of view scaling Defender XDR for various IT teams needs good collaboration and clear norms that all teams must agree to and follow.
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.
