AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued) vs. Cisco Secure IPS

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

For scenarios, I described before, like when you have centralized administration and several locations, and the majority of those locations have the same size/requirements, Firepower is well suited. Easy to maintain, relatively cheap to buy. For scenarios too small, like small sales offices like ours, I don't think Firepower could fit, basically because you'll need to invest a certain amount of money to buy, license and deploy.

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

• You will get more visibility in your network.
• Very fast performance
• Easy to detect and prevent the suspicious activities.
• Easy to export report[s]
• Daily security updates
• Efficacy
• Very low cost
• Cisco Threat Intelligence Director
• A lot of Cisco documentation available

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 performance is not always as good as you'd want. Some operations take the better part of a minute (drilling down in traffics analysis).
• Deploying or upgrading the FirePower software to the ASA firewalls takes a long time and deployment might fail without a clear reason.

Incentivized

We are in the middle of outsourcing and may not be able to keep this product.

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

Very easy to navigate GUI in the FMC and very effective at performing the intending duties.

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

We didn't have any major issues that let us need support. Only, for this reason, I think Cisco Firepower deserves the rating. Even for small issues, the partner that helped us during the project could solve it quickly. There are also tons of documents and other online resources to help maintain, administer and support the product.

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

We were using the Suricate IDS but it is very difficult to configure and manage so we replace it with Cisco Secure IPS. It gives us all the advanced security features and more control over our network.

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

• Has made it much easier to determine when incidents have occurred
• Has been effective in reducing false positives and making solution management more efficient and cost effective

Incentivized