Alert Logic

If you have a web platform or any other exposed system, it's important to have an IDS in place. This can be difficult to do right, and if you're a smaller business, you can't have a team dedicated to managing security. Alert Logic takes that burden, makes sure it's working right, and allows your team to focus on your product. With that in mind, it's not a silver bullet, and I took off one point ONLY because I think it would be harder to justify in a large enterprise with a security team already in place. Maybe there's another product out there that'll solve that use case, but Alert Logic was perfect for our needs.

Appropriate use case: When you don't have enough FTE resources to manage outside network threats and need someone to augment your own staff. The team at Alert Logic is nothing short of fantastic, and incredibly responsive.

Inappropriate use case: If you're wanting a fully managed solution that also does IPS. This solution should be used in tandem with some other type of solution to be fully effective.

Just to know within a reasonable time when an incident occurred compared to the logrhythm user setup, hoping you setup correctly, is a big help. Another was the cost benefit and the 24x7 monitoring was a driving factor for us. How the alert is provided is impressive. It can give you a detailed from start to finish of how the attack happened, the path it took and how it was prevented.

When you start to learn the software, it looks like it is so complicated and unknown, but after that, you realize that it is not actually as hard as you think. You just need to give more attention to the program and you can understand easily how to use it. At some point, vulnerabilities cannot be solved so, in this case, you may have some concern if something is happening in the system or not, but actually, there is nothing happening.

This is pretty good AV product - lightweight, easy to install, and easy on system resources. It will take some getting used to on the end user side, it doesn't scan in a traditional way, and it does not have a taskbar icon so it hard to know if it's working or installed. My only complaint would be the false positives which I know every AV system has, but the problem with Barkly is that it alerts the users with a message (which they freak out about) and it alerts IT with an email. Again, not a major issue, but it can be annoying until it is overridden. The override process is super easy though, so its again, not a big deal.

Alert Logic is ideally placed to support and protect cloud infrastructure and services such as AWS hosted services. It is less appropriate for platform as a service as this would be addressed by the provider in question. It would also be ideally suited to on-premise and hybrid cloud scenarios to protect services from attacks and breaches.