Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response vs CRITICALSTART comparison

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response and CRITICALSTART based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Managed Detection and Response (MDR) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response vs. CRITICALSTART Report (Updated: May 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response vs. CRITICALSTART

May 2024

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Helped 787,061 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

Binary Defense MDR

Market share comparison

As of June 2024, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the market share of Binary Defense MDR is 0.3% and it decreased by 3.6% compared to the previous year. The market share of Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response is 11.6% and it increased by 9.2% compared to the previous year. The market share of CRITICALSTART is 0.3% and it decreased by 76.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

Unique Categories:

No other categories found

SOC as a Service

44.4%

Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR)

0.3%

Featured Reviews

reviewer2208147

Infrastructure and Security Services Director at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 9, 2023

Gives us visibility into current critical security events and improves our time to respond

They send us alerts and have done a really good job of eliminating the false positives. Early on, there were quite a few. But as they learned about our organization and the roles of individuals within it, that has drastically gone down. For example, initially, they would say so-and-so ran a script. Now, they know who our sys admins are and that running that script is typical for them. The benefits are the visibility into current critical security events and the effect on our time to respond. Binary Defense has helped reduce our security alerts because we know where our trouble points are, or if we're missing things, and what we need to deploy. It has given us visibility into what to put in and that is how it has helped us the most. I would estimate it has reduced our security alerts by 60 to 70 percent. It has improved our security posture significantly. And because they do a lot of the management for us, it has reduced our team's workload. We only have to work on the stuff that's identified as something we need to work on, so it has definitely helped performance.

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Patti Henderson

IT Director at a legal firm with 51-200 employees

Feb 23, 2023

Easy onboarding, effective monitoring, and excellent support services

The service is fabulous. AWN is one vendor I don't mind having to call. It doesn't matter what urgency you put on the ticket - all I have entered have always received fast replies. Also, this solution offers huge peace of mind. I know I can pick up the phone and get a live person and not be trapped in a looping call tree. In the future, I would like to see a summary report. One of my bosses is on the distribution, and I spend time every Monday explaining what the reports mean. Graphs are nice visuals and would help communicate what's happening more effectively.

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Justin Hadley

Sr. Manager, Security Engineering at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Dec 29, 2020

The transparency of data in the platform is perfect: You see everything as they are seeing it

Their Zero Trust Analytics Platform (ZTAP) engine, which is kind of their correlation engine, is by far and away one of the best in the business. We can filter and utilize different lists to build out different alerts, such as, what to alert on and when not to alert. This engine helps reduce our number of alerts and false positives. The service's Trusted Behavior Registry helps the provider solve every alert. The way that they have it built out is very intelligent. The way every alert comes in, it gets triaged one direction or another. If it is already a false positive, then it is still getting addressed and reviewed on a regular cadence. Also, true positive alerts get escalated to the appropriate personnel. Its mobile app is great. The ability just to be able to quick reference and see what's coming in when you're on the move or go. You don't always need to have your computer or laptop handy, because you can operate it just from the mobile app. It can communicate with analysts, which is great. The mobile app is great at affecting the efficiency of our security operations. Those guys are using it throughout the day, whether that be at the office, home, or off hours. Typically, they triage from the mobile app. Then, if an escalation needs to be done on a computer, they will pull out a computer. We were on the original UI for a few years, so the updated UI has been a refreshing change. It has significantly more ability to filter and translate data, then load that data. It is rather intuitive to click through for some of our junior analysts or interns, especially as we are starting to onboard and teach them different aspects of the security operations team.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Binary Defense's most valuable feature is the 24/7 monitoring and threat hunting. Their team checks the latest breaches and how they're done."

"Binary Defense is comprehensive. We see most of the questionable activity. Once you see things a couple of times and are familiar with the processes, you know what those are. The level of activity is definitely favorable."

"One of the main benefits of Binary Defense MDR is the ability to easily meet with their support team to discuss any issues we encounter."

"The most valuable feature is reviewing tickets and the notes added by technicians."

"The speed at which their services are reactive is valuable. Nowadays, when a threat hits an endpoint, you've got minutes, not hours or days. Their average response time is about four minutes on an alert. For anything that needs to be sent to us, it's about fourteen minutes, which is pretty good. They're the third SOC that I've used in fifteen years. By far, they are the quickest ones to act. When you're looking at prevention, that's a key factor."

"With Binary Defense, we don't just get an alert, but also a detailed rundown of why they're alerting us on it. They tell us what was executed, or the username, script, or IP. That way, we're not wasting time investigating."

"The case interface is Binary Defense MDR's most valuable feature."

"Binary Defense has a human service department that provides live monitoring for our systems."

More Binary Defense MDR pros

"We can effectively manage the massive amounts of security data that we receive from various sources such as firewalls, switches, endpoints, and other log sources."

"Arctic Wolf is laser-focused on providing top-notch customer service."

"Whenever there is a major thing like Exchange vulnerabilities, it scans our Exchange server for indicators of compromise. It then alerts us and points exactly where we need to go to check for ourselves if it is normal or not."

"This service makes answering audits much easier since it covers so many security best practices."

"The most valuable aspect of this solution is the managed detection and response component."

"The agents give pretty good visibility into what is happening at the endpoint."

"Security protection is the best feature of this product."

"The integration between Cisco AMPs and the Windows servers is most valuable. So, they can also sandbox machines on which they see something suspicious."

More Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response pros

"Customer service and their response are phenomenal. I would give their customer support a nine point five (out of 10). Our easy access to their SOC analyst, sales team, and leadership team instills confidence in me that they are there for us 24/7."

"The way that the user interface presents data enables our team to be able to make decisions significantly quicker, rather than have to dig into the details or go back to the original tools."

"There are two parts of CRITICALSTART's services that are most valuable to us. The MDR solution where they monitor our computers, laptops, and users across the board; and their knowledge of Palo Alto firewalls."

"Their Zero Trust Analytics Platform (ZTAP) engine, which is kind of their correlation engine, is by far and away one of the best in the business. We can filter and utilize different lists to build out different alerts, such as, what to alert on and when not to alert. This engine helps reduce our number of alerts and false positives."

"I also use their mobile app. It's very easy to use and very convenient to be able to respond to alerts wherever you are. I love the app. You can respond and communicate, per ticket, with their SOC in near real-time. The response is very quick."

"My impression of the transparency of the data is that it has good detail. It allows you to see how many events have come in, how many of those events have made it down to their analysts to review, and then however many from their analysts to be able to close out, have been able to been escalated to us. It's a good metric that we can share with my management. They see the value of what the SOC is bringing on top of what my team is already doing."

"The quick interaction between the agents is the most valuable feature. If we have questions, they're quick to answer. If we make a change to our system, they quickly make the changes that are necessary to filter the logs correctly."

"From where we were prior to going into them, the service has increased our analysts’ efficiency to the point that they can focus on other areas of the business. It gives me the ability to allow analysts to do Level 3 and 4 work and stay out of the weeds of the alerts, where you tend to get alert fatigue. The service takes care of much of the Tier 1 and Tier 2 triage. It is more effective than what we had been used to, because it allows the filtering of Level 1 and Level 2 type alerts to be taken care of. This leaves less for us to handle, which is a good thing."

More CRITICALSTART pros

Cons

"I don't find any downside to them, but if I have to put one, it would be consistent manpower or staffing. The only area where the solution can be improved is going to be with people. As they grow, they are struggling with the same thing that every other company is, which is getting talent and getting that talent to stay, but they've just revised their tiering system to go from a flat analyst and manager to a three-tier solution where it goes through two or three before it gets elevated. That seems to have worked out well, so if one level misses it, the next one picks it up, and it works out fine."

"It's sometimes difficult to know when to engage Binary Defense or TrustedSec, their sister company. TrustedSec is more focused on offensive security, as opposed to the defensive security that the MDR solution provides. It would be awesome if there were a better bridge between that relationship for when we need to get more proactive services or when we need to do a penetration test."

"It's hard to think of anything that they need to improve on, but just to point out something, I would like to see them provide advanced XDR."

"We should be able to isolate devices faster. They should shorten the time between clicking on a device to contain it and carrying out the action. That would be a welcome improvement."

"I would like to see more frequent check-ins with our security status."

"We found that an earlier version of the agent had high memory usage and that was a bit concerning, but we raised the concern with their support team and they immediately replied that they had noticed the same thing and had a candidate fix already available... it totally fixed the issue."

"The only area I see for improvement with Binary Defense is their service portal. It could benefit from some enhancements."

"We found a couple of bugs in the user interface."

More Binary Defense MDR cons

"Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response's analysis and remediation parts could be improved. It's not bad, but it needs improvement."

"While it isn't a regular occurrence, there have been some gaps in response to some support questions. Questions get answered, yet there are times it takes longer than I'm comfortable with."

"They focus on detecting administrator-level control compromises. Because they're focusing more on administrator-level compromise, they are less able to see if an individual user has been compromised. It is, admittedly, very difficult because they don't know what normal human behavior is. If a hacker compromises a human account and then acts just like the human, how are you ever going to notice, unless you have some inside knowledge of how the company works? For example, they overlook account lockouts on user accounts, whereas in our own alerting system, we do not. We review every account lockout, and if it is bad, we contact the person, whereas they think of that as noise because they're more focused on the administrator-level compromise."

"It will be helpful if the dashboard is more granular."

"It's nitpicky; however, if it could integrate with more of our products, like our CRM, that would be ideal. They may only integrate with Salesforce. We use a different mid-market CRM."

"In the future, I would like to see a summary report."

"The implementation process could be a little more streamlined."

"I would like to see them build the ability to co-sell an EDR platform, manage an EDR or manage the actual response, potentially from the issues that are coming up from the security risks."

More Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response cons

"The only thing I can think of that I would like to see, and I'm sure they could work this into a service pretty easily, is not only alerts on issues that are affecting my company, but some threat intelligence of a general nature on what's out there in the environment. That might be a nice add-in."

"The UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on."

"The biggest room for improvement is not necessarily in their service or offering, but in the products that they support. I would like them to further their knowledge and ability to integrate with those tools. They have base integrations with everything, and we haven't come across anything. They should just continue to build on that API interface between their applications and other third-party consoles."

"They just did a user interface overhaul to the website portal that you use for troubleshooting tickets. The old one was fine. The new one is not intuitive..."

"They could dig a little bit deeper into the Splunk alerts when they feel like they need to be escalated to us. For example, if a locked account shows up, they could do a little extra digging to verify that the locked account was due to a bad password on the local system. They could just do a little extra digging within the Splunk environment instead of pushing it onto us to go do that extra little digging."

"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."

"The updated UI is actually pretty bad. Regarding the intuitiveness, it is fairly easy to use, but the responsiveness, on a scale of one to 10, is a one. It's really poor performance."

"It has frustrated us that they don't have a native Slack integration, because most things do now. That's something we've asked for, for years, and it just doesn't really seem like it's a priority."

More CRITICALSTART cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing isn't that bad, it's very competitive. I don't feel that it's over-priced and I don't feel that it's under-priced."

"The solution's price is spot on; if anything, it's slightly below the norm for most services. Compared to building the same team internally, it would cost more to create the same amount of capability than what we get from an external team. Price-wise, Binary Defense is in a great spot."

"It's valued at the right price. Even with the number of endpoints we have, we don't feel that it's a lot more than any competitor. In fact, it might be less expensive when you look at the fact that you're getting a full flex SOC out of it along with the tools."

"From the initial cost that Binary Defense came in with, we pared it down quite a bit over the course of 30 or 60 days. My leadership would say that their cost was high, but realistically, they were in line with the market."

"The pricing is very good. They are definitely competitive and they were lower at the time that we went with them."

"The pricing is on target. Working with their sales team on pricing negotiations was a pleasant process. They were very respectful of the constraints we had and I feel that we're paying a fair price."

"After we acquired this platform, we met with a number of different vendors. Binary Defense came in with a proposal that was surprisingly affordable. In fact, we were able to recoup the cost of their services within a short period of time. This is because Binary Defense is able to provide the same level of security as a team of two or three in-house analysts but at a fraction of the cost. As a result, Binary Defense is saving us an estimated $250,000 to $300,000 per year."

"Binary Defense MDR is priced competitively and may be slightly lower than CrowdStrike."

More Binary Defense MDR pricing and cost advice

"I rate the tool's pricing a nine out of ten."

"It is more expensive than CrowdStrike, but it also has more features. I don't remember the amount, but I do remember that it was on the higher side. I believe we have five sensors, and the sensors have a yearly cost. We don't have any additional costs, but I know that if we have more features, they will add to the cost."

"The pricing is fair."

"The pricing is pretty competitive."

"I find their pricing to be reasonable and competitive."

"The pricing has always been competitive. They have always been good to us. They will make it a fight. They don't try to hide anything; it's always been fully transparent and well-worth what we pay for it."

"There are contractual penalties if their SLAs are not met. This commitment was very important in our decision to go with this service, because not having downtime is extremely important to us. The providers has not missed an SLA in the 18 months that I have worked with them."

"As far as the expense goes, it's very competitive pricing and the services you get are almost like you have a person on your team."

"The pricing of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."

"I've told CRITICALSTART that I think the managed service they provide is cheaper than it should be. It's a really good deal."

"It costs a lot for what we felt comfortable to spend."

"Overall, for what I'm paying for it, and the benefit I'm getting out of it, it is right where it needs to be, if not a little bit in my favor. For what it costs me to actually have this service, I could afford one internal person to do that job, but now I have a team of 10 or more who are doing that job, and they don't sleep because they work shifts."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Energy/Utilities Company

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Binary Defense MDR?

The most valuable feature is reviewing tickets and the notes added by technicians.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Binary Defense MDR?

Binary Defense is fairly priced. I would say that Binary Defense is flexible in negotiating and tailoring a solution ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Binary Defense MDR?

The only area I see for improvement with Binary Defense is their service portal. It could benefit from some enhanceme...

See all answers

What do you like most about Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response?

The agents give pretty good visibility into what is happening at the endpoint.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response?

The pricing is pretty competitive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response?

It will be helpful if the dashboard is more granular. The vendor must allow us to see what they see on their end.

See all answers

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Compared 21% of the time

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Compared 22% of the time

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Compared 22% of the time

Red Canary vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 16% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon Complete vs CRITICALSTART

Compared 14% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Binary Defense MDR

June 2024

Download Binary Defense MDR product report

Buyer's Guide

Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response

June 2024

Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response report

Download Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response product report

Buyer's Guide

CRITICALSTART

June 2024

Download CRITICALSTART product report

Also Known As

Binary Defense Vision, Binary Defense Managed Detection and Response, Binary Defense Managed Detection & Response

Arctic Wolf AWN CyberSOC

Critical Start, CriticalStart

Learn More

Binary Defense

Arctic Wolf Networks

Critical Start

Overview

Binary Defense provides a Managed Detection and Response service using an Open XDR strategy that detects and isolates threats early in the attack lifecycle. Expert security analysts in the Binary Defense Security Operations Center leverage an attacker’s mindset, monitoring your environments for security events 24x7x365 and acting as an extension of your security teams. When a security event occurs, Binary Defense analysts triage, disposition, and prioritize the event. Analysts conduct full kill chain analysis and supply tactical and strategic mitigation recommendations to your security team with the goal of increasing your organization’s security posture against the latest adversary threats.

Visit us online at https://www.binarydefense.com

Built on the industry’s only cloud-native platform to deliver security operations as a concierge service, the Arctic Wolf® Managed Detection and Response (MDR) solution eliminates alert fatigue and false positives to promote a faster response with detection and response capabilities tailored to the specific needs of your organization. Your Arctic Wolf Concierge Security® Team (CST) works directly with you to perform threat hunting, incident response, and guided remediation, while also providing strategic recommendations uniquely customized for your environment.

The cybersecurity landscape is growing more complex by the day with the arrival of new threats and new tools supposedly designed for combating them. The problem is it’s all creating more noise and confusion for security professionals to sort through.

CRITICALSTART is the only MDR provider committed to eliminating acceptable risk and leaving nothing to chance. They believe that companies should never have to settle for “good enough.” Their award-winning portfolio includes end-to-end Professional Services and Managed Detection and Response (MDR). CRITICALSTART MDR puts a stop to alert fatigue by leveraging the Zero Trust Analytics Platform (ZTAP) plus the industry-leading Trusted Behavior Registry, which eliminates false positives at scale by resolving known-good behaviors. Driven by 24x7x365 human-led, end-to-end monitoring, investigation and remediation of alerts, their on-the-go threat detection and response capabilities are enabled via a fully interactive MOBILESOC app.

Sample Customers

Securitas USA, Black Hills Energy, Lincoln Electric,The J.M. Smuckers Company, New York Community Bank, State of Connecticut, NCR

Agero, Madison Memorial Hospital, DLZ, Howard LLP, City of Sparks

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response vs. CRITICALSTART

May 2024

Free Report: Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response vs. CRITICALSTART

Find out what your peers are saying about Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response vs. CRITICALSTART and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.

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