RackFoundry Total Security Management (discontinued) vs. Splunk Enterprise Security

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.

Well-Suited Scenarios:

Real-Time Threat Response: ES excels in swiftly detecting and responding to security threats through data correlation.

Compliance Management: ES streamlines compliance with detailed logs and reports, ideal for regulated industries.

User Behavior Analytics: Effective in monitoring user and entity behavior, particularly for insider threat detection.

Large-Scale Environments: Valuable for organizations with diverse data sources and high volumes of data.

Incident Investigation: ES aids in post-incident analysis, reconstructing events to understand root causes.

Less Appropriate Scenarios:

Smaller Organizations: For simpler setups, ES may be complex and costly.

Static Environments: In low-risk settings, ES's advanced features may be unnecessary.

Limited Resources: Tight budgets or sparse IT resources may hinder effective ES use.

Lack of In-House Expertise: Without security experts, optimizing ES can be challenging.

Budget Constraints: ES may be cost-prohibitive for budget-conscious organizations, prompting consideration of more affordable alternatives.

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

• Its best feature is its user interface, which is easy to navigate and understand. All you need is a little tutorial on how to use the Splunk query language and you're done.
• Logs can be easily uploaded or shared across multiple platforms and display a highly insightful graphical representations of data using graphs, tables, and many other formats.

Incentivized

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

• To identify User Behaviour analysis is lacking component which we get in Splunk UBA.
• The documentation part is hard to work on because if the new user tries to learn ES then the documentation is not user-friendly.
• ES must ass more Knowledge objects by default to make security-related aspects more reliable and enhance the details.

Incentivized

We are very happy with Splunk and would advise anyone to take a serious look at it. It might look pricey but the rewards Splunk offers seem endless.

Incentivized

You definitely need to learn how to use Splunk to get the most of the tool. There are many courses available for free to get up to speed on the usability of the tool but it's not that simple. It will take time to digest all the data and to understand how to query for what you are looking for.

Incentivized

I'm not an ES user, but, in my implementation I usually try to prevent all service stops to guarantee High availability to the final customers.

Incentivized

ES requires a very performant infrastructure: if it has it's performant, otherwise not. I had situation with a very performant infrastructure and I didn't notized that it was a distributed architecture, it seemed that there ware few data on my PC, othewise I experienced less performant infrastructures with less performaces.

Incentivized

It's good when it's responsive, but I've had times where I had to wait quite a while for a response. But these are typically the exceptions rather than the rule. When you do get a response it is always well-informed and appropriate. I would say they've been trending better over time with this.

Incentivized

I experienced only on-line training, but the trainers were very professional and competent. Maybe it could be more useful if they also have an experience in projects because sometimes they didn't have a real project experience to communicate to the students. Anyway, it was very interesting and I learned many thing that's very difficoult (or maybe impossible!) to have by myself, aven if I have more than 10 years of Splunk activity experience.

Incentivized

It was very interesting and I learned many thing that's very difficoult (or maybe impossible!) to have by myself. The only problem was that, when I worked with the Splunk Professional Services, I found some difference between the training contents and the information from PS. In addition is required a long experience on Splunk Enterprise for the data ingestion part, in other words I'm able to work with ES because I'm worling on Splunk since 11 years, otherwise I'd some problem.

Incentivized

It's a fantatic product and it was very useful the presence of Splunk Professional Services for the Design Phase and the final Health Check.

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.

LogRhythm is good for a team comprising mostly non-technical IT users. Unlike Splunk, it has a GUI log search and a good ticketing system. Splunk is better than Logrhythm for me as it provides me with the ultimate flexibility to write custom queries. Scalyr is a good tool and quite frankly lot faster than Splunk. However, I prefer Splunk because of its better Dashboards and panel customization abilities. Elastic is another amazing tool. It is hard to choose between the two especially because both have different sets of logs on them. I use both. Elastic for internal server logs, Splunk for everything else.

Incentivized

We have on prem splunk and it’s mostly east to setup, but we have issues keeping data separated between customer splunk deployments while at the same time only having to look at one SIEM to address events in every environment

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.

• We have a 100% success rate on all our ES implementations due to the amazing documentation and Splunk enablement on the subject.
• Our Splunk ES business has grown 100% YoY for the last 3 years.
• In terms of long term management and maintenance, ES has been highly stable and predictable, reducing our overhead on costly services team for ad hoc maintenance work.