AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued) vs. Rapid7 InsightIDR

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

It has been brilliant for us in terms of understanding the behaviour affecting our endpoints and assets. We have full visibility of our alerts, which menas we can act on them immediately. We use a single pain of glass with dashboards that can be easily drilled down into to get further information. It has laso helped us eo create bespoke reports for senios Managmeent, while at the same time supports other teams like Network Mnagement and Operations.

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

• Rapid7 InsightIDR does a very good job at keeping virus definitions up to date so that our threat intelligence is very up to date when knowing what to protect against.
• It helps us by scanning all of our infrastructure components and highlights where improvements need to be made in security so we can be proactive with our security initiatives.
• It has automated response mechanisms to triage and resolve any potentials risks allowing us to save time in the long run.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Sometimes Rapid7 InsightIDR will be too locked down and without knowing will block applications and processes needed for day to day operation.
• System scans with Rapid7 InsightIDR can be very bandwidth-heavy on the network and system resources.
• From a recent incident, we have seen more and more false positives from Rapid7 InsightIDR on areas that we know are secure.

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

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

Between Rapid7 InsightIDR and Crowdstrike, we liked Rapid7 InsightIDR due to the functionality of the system and the features Rapid7 InsightIDR has. Rapid7 InsightIDR was very easy to deploy in our environment to our endpoint devices. We like the scanning capabilities and the console we felt was very easy to use and can be easily caught up to our IT staff. Also during vulnerability scans, we felt that Rapid7 InsightIDR was able to detect more and any competitor out there.

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

• Rapid7 InsightIDR has allowed us to be proactive in securing our systems as the vulnerability scans give us a lens at what we need to fortify when it comes to security.
• In recent incidents its allowed us to save time and money as it mostly detects issues accurately and we are able to bring systems back quickly without too much downtime for the business.
• With recent updates, we are confident that Rapid7 InsightIDR is a good solution for the long run as they are always making adjustments to their platform and improving it with every release.

Incentivized