AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued) vs. Cisco IPS Sensor (Discontinued)

The most obvious scenario in which OSSIM is well suited is in a single office/home office (SOHO) or small business, in which budget is reduced but asset discovery and vulnerability management are greatly needed and appreciated. OSSIM is lightweight and free, so the real challenge to face is to hire or assign an administrator to manage and operate it, instead of any investment on an expensive appliance. Also, as resellers, promoting usage of OSSIM to customers charging for professional services for installation, administration, and maintenance (remember that OSSIM doesn't have official support from AlienVault) is a great asset for the organization.

Incentivized

IPS sensors are more suited for companies that do not have visibility into their network with third-party analyzing tools. Scenarios would be to place IPS sensors at the perimeter firewalls mainly. IPS sensors are less appropriate for companies that have third-party analyzing tools that will mitigate vulnerabilities and malicious traffic and activities already.

Incentivized

• Threat analysis. It can correlate different events happening to detect a pattern or an attack.
• Dashboard provides a clean, single location to see what is going on in our environment.
• Up to date open threat exchange means everything new popping up out there is included and watched for in our environment.

Incentivized

• Identifies and blocks malicious traffic.
• Detects unwanted traffic and allows your company to be proactive, let alone reactive.
• Comprehensive Threat protection allows companies to adjust thresholds and policies at will.

Incentivized

• Creating custom rules is a bit complicated
• Reporting could be improved
• Agent has caused conflicts with a couple of our other applications

Incentivized

• The web GUI is somewhat slow.
• Sometimes difficult to adjust policies.
• Fail open feature may not work properly all the time.

Incentivized

AlienVault OSSIM is far easy to use and manage - provided you know what you're doing. As any SIEM application, there is some background knowledge required in order to take advantage of the product's functionalities, such as the log correlation and analysis. Other than that, the application is quite usable and robust.

Incentivized

Everything is done through MSSP and installation pro services. Once those hours are burned up, then you're on your own without a lot of help. Typically the pro services hours aren't enough to get past 60 days and MSSP are hit and miss. We had a miss for installation helpers.

Incentivized

Cisco TAC has been great at helping with configurations and issues that may arise

Incentivized

AlienVault OSSIM as the first experience with a SIEM is very fine, especially if your company is an SMB. Every SIEM shares some features in common with other products, features such as log retrieval and normalization. So if you stick with principles, you can learn other SIEM products as well. If your environment is not of a minimum size, LogRhythm might be overkill for your network, same with McAfee Enterprise Security Manager.

Incentivized

IPS sensors provides the necessary network visibility my company needs to satisfy its security appetite. By doing so, we have been able to stay compliant and up to date with today's network security requirements and procedures. We are able to be proactive with vulnerabilities and reactive to malicious traffic and intrusions in our day to day operations.

Incentivized

• OSSIM and the installers didn't really help us optimize at installation. OSSIM went without optimization for almost two years before that fact was noticed. I think this decreased ROI.
• Finding and researching incidents is much faster with all data available. Sometimes too much data, though.

Incentivized

• Provided less need to purchase third party analyzing tools.
• Needed more dedicated staff to build/review/and maintain policies and such.
• Answers companies need for network security.

Incentivized