AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued) vs. RackFoundry Total Security Management (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

I would not recommend RackFoundry to any company whatsoever. At first it seems like a viable solution for the cost. Offering SOC monitoring, implementation and deployment all-in-one seems like a great deal. However it all falls apart when push comes to shoves. As it currently stands we are just over a year into our deployment. All we have to show for it is a fancy web app that does not display any information. In the year that this deployment has been ongoing it has taken us a few months just to get the virtual appliance installed. Then it was another few months of back and forth until we finally got credentials. Then when I finally logged in we began the process of deploying agents and began collecting data. Shortly afterward things began to stall to where they are now. We faced major issues with the web app, scans were not running, assets were not reporting in and data and reports were not being generated. After doing some more research and googling I realized that we were not alone with these issues. Countless other reports from companies who have had similar issues to ours. Each time I ask when the issues were going to be resolved, I got the same answer every time: "The next release should fix the issues you have been experiencing", only for the next release to come, and the issues remain.

• 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

• All-in-one solution that covers all the essentials and basic of security needs
• Unique methodology way for cost effective enterprise security solution
• Help exceed compliance as their interface allows you to tailor your compliance needs
• Simple and friendly customizable user interface dashboard
• Unique function: Ask an Expert
• Premium fully manage automatic updates with access
• Deployable Security Modules that encompass IPS/IDS/SIEM/VA/FW
• Knowledgeable engineers, who helped improve our overall infrastructure by making it more secure

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

Incentivized

• Product they offer does not work.
• Time to implement is unbelievably long.
• Services they offer are so far, non-existent.

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

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

Well I have experience with the big names: SecureWorks, IBM and Splunk. Individually their logging tools are much better than RackFoundry's Total Security Management. This is great for large corporations and urban cities, however not so great for municipalities, mid size businesses and companies who fluctuate between 1-7 members on their IT staff. Why? Because it takes too much of their resources and integration with other products gets a little rough as you will need to configure your preferences to theirs. When a company has stability it is great to have a name brand product, however renewals and upgrade costs can be taxing to an organization.

• 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

• Just knowing that we are protected from attacks is our main objective and so far that sense of security is well worth the cost associated with it.