Snort vs. Symantec Advanced Threat Protection

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.

Incentivized

It is valuable software for when it comes to a large or medium organization, since it helps to protect the endpoints, but as the number of servers increases its value increases. However, it is important to keep in mind that when it comes to low end devices, its protection can affect their performance. This is because it is not a software with a very light agent.

Incentivized

• IPS detection.
• DoS detection.
• Packet logging.

Incentivized

• The incident management piece is the heart and soul of the product. A single area where all data in relation to network and email protection is available.
• Works well in conjunction with the standard Symantec Endpoint product.
• URL Protection is advanced and very helpful
• Technical support is great and definitely the best I have ever seen for a "anti-virus" type product.

Incentivized

• At times can be unstable with Cisco bugs, require frequent upgrading.
• FTD images that are being pushed for ASAs are less efficient from an administration standpoint, no CLI.

Incentivized

• I don't like that I have to maintain the client and keep it up to date. Updating the client is not a very easy process.
• Deploying the client could be easier. They have a deployment tool, but it doesn't really get to all PCs, which means I still have to manually deploy it.
• Because the product has so much customization, it can also be very difficult to set up and understand.

Incentivized

Symantec Advanced Threat Protection has done a sufficient job at identifying true positives. However, the UI could be improved and the amount of false positives is a little too frequent for my liking

Incentivized

There is a small learning curve, but compared to other AV products it is fairly simple and easy to catch onto

Incentivized

Support responds fast for higher priority issues, they have always been good at solving the problems we encounter.

Incentivized

No, besides to review documentation prior to beginning. That is what helped lead to a smooth implementation

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Frankly, the other products were too expensive to make the change from Symantec so we continued with the tried and true protection. We don't have the funding to move to a more expensive product and the manpower that it would take to implement a new solution.

Incentivized

• Being open source, ROI on free is hard to beat for something that works.
• I believe it greatly enhances the security of my network.

• Some digital assets were lost due to failures to detect various threats.
• We had to use other products in combination in order to trust that all threats were actually detected, taking extra time. We couldn't use just SATP.
• Ability to quickly manage/deploy via AD made maintenance of the application itself quick and easy.

Incentivized