AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued) vs. IBM Security QRadar SIEM

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

QRadar is very well suited on environments where there are not multiple tenants or domains, we do have success on this kind of scenario. IBM Security QRadar SIEM is less appropriate for environments with multiple tenants, specially when each tenant represent a different End Costumer (such as for MSSP companies), those environments require a high amount of rules and building blocks replications, since each tenant will have its own "BB definitions", servers, rules exception, etc. Also, some information, such as EPS count or EPS dropped are generated by QRadar's own log sources, which takes place on default domain, therefore users associated with different domain can not have access to those logs, even when the information is related to other domain's environment. For example, even if Event Collector 1 is associated to Domain A, the log informing its dropped EPS is generated by System notification, log source that must be associated to Default domain.

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

• Enables identification and prioritization of vulnerabilities in IT infrastructure for corrective action.
• Facilitates security incident investigation and forensic analysis.
• Provides a real-time view of security events, enabling immediate incident response.
• Can integrate with external threat intelligence sources to enrich data and improve threat detection.
• Enables the generation of detailed and customized reports.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Need to spend more time configuring the system to properly interpret and normalize different type of data collected from multiple resources.
• While Rule creation QRadar uses that rules to detect security threats and generate alerts, but to creating and managing rules is bit complex & tedious work to complete.
• IBM Security QRadar SIEM is excellent in handling large & complex systems that requires in-depth knowledge and extensive training to configure and maintain the system which includes upgrading, optimization of performance & issue troubleshooting.

Incentivized

With the arrival of IBM Security QRadar SIEM at our company, we have a better vision of all the security needs that may arise, it is a very safe software to use that prevents threats from damaging our IT environment, it is impossible to change it for another software.

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

As a grade I give 8 as QRadar is not easy to learn. It requires some time to master it. It also needs a team of people actively working on the product. Once you learn to use it the software works very well and it is easy to correlate and understand detected threats. It only takes time to learn how to use it well and configure it properly.

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

Customer support is Good of IBM, While Using IBM QRadar its deployment is to slow and suddenly stop working and crashed we have contacted IBM Support and Rised a Ticket within a few minute we get call back from customer support and Query Resolved by them Fast And Rapid Support of Ibm

Incentivized

The training was very useful and the people who taught us were very knowledgeable. Although the software may initially seem difficult to learn they made things much easier for us.

Incentivized

The training was very useful and the people who taught us were very knowledgeable. Although the software may initially seem difficult to learn they made things much easier for us.

Incentivized

Initial patience is required to learn how to use the product, and it takes a dedicated team to use it. One person is not enough, and it's not enough to just set it up and check it once in a while. It has to be used daily and kept under control to be used effectively

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

I would always recommend Splunk over IBM Security QRadar SIEM unless you're trying to save money or only onboarding and normalizing well known data sources. IBM Security QRadar SIEM doesn't seem to handle RBA and complicated, chaining correlation rules very effectively and if I had to write a custom add-on for custom data, I found it easier to do so in Splunk.

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

• Like any cybersecurity product, any money you don't lose on a prevented attack is money that you saved
• Most of the apps are free and provides great enrichment like User Behaviour Analytics
• Top quality alerts gives enormous value to the "passive" data that flows into the infrastructure

Incentivized