AlienVault OSSIM (discontinued) vs. Trellix Enterprise Security Manager

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

McAfee is a good solution if you're in a medium/large company and if you're looking for a solution that can be customized and expanded. I also recommend if you have the most common log sources on your environment, since McAfee supports the major log sources (but lack a lot of small vendors). In my opinion, I wouldn't recommend McAfee for small companies, since it's not that easy to manage and maintain.

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

• McAfee Enterprise Security Manager has a large library of pre-made correlations that reduces the amount of work needed to make it functional.
• This is a core McAfee product that is still getting support.
• It has a substantial amount of compatibility and integration with other products.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• If there is a requirement to integrate into other vendor products i.e. (log sharing) then this was very cumbersome.
• Integration of vulnerability scanning that is available in other vendor products would be a good addition.
• When integrating all of Intel's products a third party consultancy is usually required, where other vendor products can be configured without this additional cost.

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

Dealing with the McAfee support is a lottery. Sometimes you reach them and it's a really experienced engineer, but sometimes it's a person with no clue on the tool. We had few cases where our internal engineers knew more about the tool than the McAfee support. However, sometimes we get hold of some really good engineers that know the tool from inside out

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

McAfee Enterprise Security Manager is a better option than other security software because it's both inexpensive and extremely effective. Norton and other security software boast a high price tag but don't always back it up when it comes to performance. With McAfee Enterprise Security Manager, I know I'm getting a quality product for a fair price.

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

• It effectively blocks potential attacks from outside.
• It aids us in doing more effective root-cause analysis whenever an incident occurs, since it gives us enough details to understand what went wrong.

Incentivized