Arista NDR Reviews

Our use cases are vast and varied. Quite simply, we looked at tools that would look at network detection and responses out-of-the-box. Looking at Awake, there are hundreds of security use cases built into the system itself. I typically utilize the tool across the enterprise looking to detect those hard to find threats 

I am looking at:

• Indicators of compromise for ransomware
• Possible command and controls
• Privacy
  
• Clear text passwords
• Persistence
• Data ex-filtration and compliance for GDPR
• Various, very hard to detect models of data ex filtration, such as data ex-filtration via  e.g DNS or ICMP
• Bad domains and traffic to bad domains
• The list goes on and on.

I have over a hundred use cases turned on running in the background and looking at the following (for example):

• Defense evasion, use of proxies in order to hide data ex-filtration.
• Rogue hardware, identifying new devices on my network, whether they be wireless, wireless handheld devices, smartphones, laptops, etc.
• Brute force attempts against passwords.
• Password spraying attempts.

It is deployed inline into an appliance on-prem and leveraging a network SPAN port.

We are using the latest version.

It is all about visibility. From an information security standpoint, the capability for the team to be able to single out devices to respond quickly and intelligently, to say for example, "It is this laptop (or endpoint) from this person in finance. I know exactly what it's doing, what's wrong, and I know how to fix it." So, they're empowered walking up to that department or individual. The face of information security used to be, "Oh, the security guys are on that floor." Now, there's a different take. "These guys know what they are doing and are here to help me. I have an issue, and they solved it very quickly." It's making overall security less painful for our folks, which translates into secure adoption of security policies, standards, and awareness. That's another intangible.

Sometimes, the harder part is not interjecting and removing a node, but understanding what it was doing so we have a higher assurance of what type of data may or may not have been exfiltrated because that may trigger reporting laws, etc. 

We operate globally, so we have to adhere to the principles of GDPR, and also in Canada, PIPEDA. We have a regulatory/legal obligation to report if there is a data exfiltration. Understanding the nature of the data (what these devices are connecting to), if there is an exfiltration, goes a long way to shaving the time off my staff has to spend running these issues down. For example, one incident could potentially in gray dollars cost thousands of dollars. If, at the end of that investigation, we find out days later that we potentially would have had a reporting obligation, this makes it very difficult. Now, we would have to dive deeper and find out what that data was before we can report to the regulatory bodies, and in particular, our data protection authority for GDPR.

It also allows me to prioritize my staff. So, there are a lot of intangible dollar savings there. Rather than having a group of folks running around attempting to focus on preventative measures, we are focusing on the situations at hand ensuring that we have a grasp of what's going on in our network.

This solution’s encrypted traffic analysis helps us stay in compliance with government regulations. It is all about understanding data exfiltration, what is ingressing and egressing in our network. One common attack vector is exfiltrating data using encryption. My capabilities to see potential data exfiltration over encrypted traffic is second to none now. 

It is all about being able to say with confidence to the executives, the senior leadership team at the board level, that by putting this tool in place we have visibility into east-west lateral movement and traffic in the north-south. We also have a high degree of confidence that we are maintaining our security posture.

It doesn't matter where in my network, including wireless networks, I have it all feeding into the same mirrored port. I can see the traffic from any device which is plugged into the network at any time. The Awake ML will identify it. Then, on the dashboard, it will show me every morning any net new devices, how many devices are active, and how many devices may be impacted by a potential threat. I can see instantly any suspect domains that those devices are trying to connect into and what domains are unique. It also shows me net new domains every day at a glance. It then categorizes all of that information using its ML capability into an easy to use interface: high, medium and low. If need be, it will allow me to pivot on that device specifically, looking at it graphically. I can use that to understand what that device is connecting to, and in the same view, understand what type of data is moving back and forth.

We have a certain amount of IoT here, but not a lot. We have things behind our firewall that are definitely IoT which made me nervous, but I'm a lot more comfortable now. E.g., we are a very large software as a service company based mid-market. We have somewhat of a startup culture, so we have food vending type services that exist behind our firewall, albeit segmented. These are Internet of things, such as an automated machine that cooks food that is constantly reporting back to the vendor. We have several different other examples of IoT within our shop, and it allows me to see that traffic as well.

What is impressive about the tool is the time to value. Plugging it onto our network, we have found things that other tools have just never seen. We found those issues quickly and were able to action against those issues, remediating them quickly. I don't know another product that delivers as much value so quickly.

I have the tool set up to alert, be able to look at things, and put things together graphically. This helps to understand the fingerprints of the device, what the device has done, where it's been, and what it's doing on my network. It really gives me a high assurance that my security posture will remained intact.

I have it now integrated into our security incident and event management (SIEM) tool, so I am able to correlate events across my network using Awake as my front-end or my first line of defense. Then, I can also pull in the Awake information and use that to pivot across to other sources within our environment, whether that be enterprise detection and response at the endpoint level or security orchestration and response.

Awake's Security Knowledge Graph is incredible in terms of a couple of things: 

1. The system is laid out very easily for me to utilize. 
2. I find it comforting if I look at the DNA of the Awake security staff. All of them are deep and wide, in terms of their experiences. You have ex-Mandiant folks along with ex-US military folks who have been through serious cyber situations and assisted large companies, if not governmental organizations. They have seen these threats in the wild. They know how to deal with these threats. Moreover, on weekly calls, they are notifying or diving deep into areas that we might have missed.

The only issue is that Awake affords you so much information behind its fingerprinting capability. When it does trigger, you need to have a hard look at what is going on because there is a reason for that trigger.

They have worked very hard on the interface. I would like to see things laid out somewhat differently, and not due my familiarity with the tool. The tool has grown a lot since I started using it in October, and there is room for user interface improvements. 

I would like to see the capability to import what's known as STIX/TAXII in an IOC format. It currently doesn't offer this. This would be a nice, like a wish list. 

We are looking at cloud TAPs for visibility into cloud infrastructure. We offer a software as a service leveraging cloud. To take things to the next level, it is putting the ability and capability of the device into:

1. Our cloud offering to look for threats.
2. Leverage it further for any cloud services or SaaS that we use here.

We acquired Awake in October 2019.

The stability has been rock solid. I haven't had an issue. I have gone through two system upgrades since October. When the system is to be updated, what is nice and somewhat different than a lot of the other appliance vendors that layer the services on top, they contact me before they push the updates out. For example, I had one of their service techs called me at about five o'clock, "Hi, it's William. Do you mind if we go ahead and perform the upgrade for you at this point in time? If that's not convenient, and you need go through a change control committee, etc. That's not a problem. We can schedule that. But if we're good to go, I can do it now for you." I like that they're high touch.

They do all the maintenance. It is an appliance, so they perform all the upgrades. From an administration standpoint, I have one person dealing with it which is limited to only setting up user IDs. That's really the only administration required in the tool.

As we scale, the tool can scale with us. I'm currently using it with a one gigabit interface. As we scale up, we will scale utilizing the tool.

It's very easy to scale. If we scale in terms of our bandwidth and utilization, it's as simple as looking at the next appliance. Then, assuming we scale to a back-end, if we were to look at a 10 gigabit interface, it's as simple as producing or plugging it in through a Network TAP or another SPAN port.

Seven people are using it right now in an analyst format.

One of the nice things about Awake is they are nimble. One of the requests that I put in October for feature enhancement has already been put into the product. They released it with 2.0. That's the ability to utilize situations for situational awareness. When my security analysts look at various issues, we are tracking specific items or indicators that compromise using what they call their situation overlay. Now, that is in beta preview. However, I have an advanced copy which allows me to track and trend an incident all the way through the MITRE ATT&CK chain or kill chain. So, it's a real powerful feature that they have stepped up and implemented in the product.

That is their standard technical support. It is a real "we are here to help" type of feel with just a group of dedicated security professionals. If I look at the DNA of their company, from who's at the senior leadership team level down to the analyst level, these guys have lived it. Their combined experience within the cybersecurity space is second to none.

The last time that I had an issue, it was Awake's technical support told me that I had an issue, which was nice.

Based on standard support terms and conditions, they have always responded in an expected time frame. I've only had one issue of note with the product and that was resolved quickly. I had a response back in less than 20 minutes and the issue was resolved in under two hours.

Before having Awake, we didn't have the visibility. I could get a lot of the north-south traffic and understand what was emanating, ingressing, and egressing in the network, but didn't have the overall picture. 

We had solutions which allowed us to leverage indicators of compromise for indicators of compromise. Really, it was a bunch of point solutions reporting into our SIEM solution, as we are a Splunk shop. It's important to note that Awake doesn't do all things, but what it does do, it does really well and perhaps the best in the industry. So, Awake also puts its logs into the SIEM solution.

We had a SIEM. I had a lot of indicators of compromise type fingerprints in that SIEM. I had all of the log files throughout the whole of the organization dumping into that SIEM. However, from the network detection and response side, looking at east-west traffic, those fingerprints, and in a single pane of glass, I wasn't getting that before I had the Awake device.

The Awake tool gives me the east-west traffic and lateral movement picture, as well as the north-south traffic. Therefore, I'm getting a full picture of my network at any one point in time. These are things that keep you up at night being in the CISO role.

Here is how straightforward the initial setup was. I got the device in October, which is fourth quarter for us and extremely busy. The Awake team wanted to fly in to do the setup. I told them that it was not going to work due to the timing and logistics. So, they shipped out the box. My team just put it in a rack and plugged it into the SPAN port, then we were done.

That was the entire setup. It is an appliance. All it requires is a Network Tap or SPAN port. We plugged the interface in, gave it a public side interface, and the Awake team did the final config remotely, then we were up and running in under two hours. That includes the rack time.

We had several meetings with Awake in terms of understanding our environment:

• Where it was best to place the sensors.
• What size sensors would we need.
• What type of use cases I was looking for.
• What were my pain points.
• What kept me up at night before we even embarked to the contract signing.

Two people were required for deployment from my side along with one person from Awake.

The time from finding threats to remediation is almost instantaneous. For example, I found a threat this morning and remediated it in less than five minutes. The issue that I encountered today was definitely data exfiltration. It was a malware that was hitting domain generated algorithms and also attempting to use Tor to obfuscate the data exfiltration. I found that within three minutes, and then the next following two minutes, we interjected, did the remediation, and had the node off the network. 

When you're trying to put a dollar value on the protection of personally identifiable information, potential financial information, and the loss there of, it is very difficult. However, in this instance, it could have been a lot worse. In terms of grey dollars and my staff's time, you're looking at a $1000 worth of savings because we would had to glean through logs, identify the device, chase it down, and understand what it was doing on the network.

The solution has saved thousands of dollars within the first day. Our ROI has to be in the tens of thousands of dollars since October last year. It's about the peace of mind and my ability to pass by the CEO, and say to him, "Don't worry, I got that. There was a network incident, but I'm confident that we caught this endpoint before there was any data exfiltration. I know what it was talking to and what the nature of the issue was." That is powerful right there.

I signed a three-year deal as it was most cost effective for my firm - with no doubt in my mind we will see ROI in year one.

I am hoping to involve them in a managed network detection and response relationship as well, which is another one of their offerings.

There are no additional costs. The product does what it says that it will do. 

I am impressed with the data science capabilities of Awake, in regards to AI and ML capabilities built into the tool. We stacked up Awake against a competitor. I put both products, Darktrace and Awake, in a head-to-head bake-off back during the October time frame. Awake was the clear winner for a bunch of reasons: ease of use, a lot of the lateral movement for triggers on indicators of compromise and the Awake rule sets were far deeper and more insightful than information I was receiving out of the ML capabilities afforded within Darktrace.

Darktrace had quite a few false positives. 

Another problem with Darktrace that I found was the interface and the ability to work within the tool to look at information graphically. While available in Darktrace, the ability to navigate and dive deeper into those fingerprints signatures is very kludgy.

Understand where your network points are and where you are best served to position sensors. The tool won't work unless it's positioned effectively in your network. Rely upon Awake staff's expertise. They have collective information cybersecurity experience in the hundreds of years, so just listen to them in terms of their guidance and where to position your sensors. Understand your traffic flow before moving forward with the solution, making sure that it's right for you. For instance, understand that if you have several satellite offices, you may be challenged and need to purchase several devices or appliances. In our case, this was a non-issue because I back haul all of my traffic to one centralized point.

I am impressed with the product. It is a solid, powerful tool. It's a truly unique plug and play appliance and solution. I'd give it a 10 (out of 10). If I could give it more than a 10, I would. It is really an outstanding product.

We have had a few false positives, two or three. I was looking at one this morning. However, that was a fault of ours because the IP address on the endpoint wasn't in a reserved mode, so the name of the machine changed. Here is where the ML capabilities shines. The IP address changed, thus a new machine name was apparent to the ML engine. Then, the ML engine looked at both the IP and machine name, and said, "I don't know. It's still the same IP, but it's doing lateral movement now." It turns out that IP was reallocated to a machine in our development side for our DevSecOps, where that type of behavior is totally normal. However, the ML in the tool spiked that out immediately.

The biggest lessons that I've learned are thinking that your common point solutions, even though you're aggregating them all will point out all the potential nefarious activities behind your firewall or attempted attacks outside your firewall. You are not going to see everything. You really need to empower machine learning and AI capabilities of one of these tools in order to see the typical advanced persistent threats (APTs) or those low, slow threats on your network. For example, the anomaly that pops up for five minutes every month because it's using a domain generated algorithm is really where this tool shines. It looks for that needle in a haystack and that anomalous behavior that you're not necessarily going to pick out using a SIEM tool. I don't care how good the SIEM tool is, you need a dedicated product to effectively understand that east-west traffic and ascertain whether or not it is hostile.

The solution is a kind of Swiss Army knife. It can do a number of different things. We primarily use it for network traffic analysis and threat hunting.

We had an event where an attacker tried to steal login credentials. We were able to find the targets on the network using Awake and we were able to turn on multifactor authentication, not only for those users but for the entire enterprise. We were discovering that that was a very common attack tactic. It was a driver for change. Now, all users at this company have multifactor authentication as a result of Awake's capabilities.

For a long time I was the only person in our company doing security. We're a $30 billion dollar company. So you can imagine how much I appreciate how much time Awake has saved me to be able to do other things. It's been an immense help.

The solution provides us with better situational awareness. In terms of network visibility, it's looking at all network traffic. Anything that's going through, it's doing that full packet capture and it's doing the analysis using the algorithms. And it's telling me what's on the network and what it's doing.

There are quite a few valuable features. The most valuable aspect of the tech is the fact that it's like a "force-multiplier." It will reduce the amount of time and effort it takes to triage a potential compromise. 

That's important because, in everyday slang, time is money. If you've ever done a business-impact analysis — business continuity — if an attacker can reduce the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of a given system, it will have a financial impact. The quicker you can eliminate or mitigate the compromise, or avoid it altogether, the less money you are looking at spending to recover from a hack. If you can discover it, and detect it, and prevent it before the attack is successful, you actually have a return on investment.

The Security Knowledge Graph tries to centralize things that are notable in the environment. Awake uses a lot of AI and ML to bring to an analyst's attention things that should be of concern. It reduces the amount of searching that an analyst has to do to find notable events or devices. It collates all that and it puts it in one spot. So if you have a device that is beaconing out to a malicious IP, to download malware or the like, Awake will see that and it will alert the analyst right away, rather than the analyst trying to find it in aggregate data.

The data science capabilities of Awake Security are very strong. For a network traffic-analysis platform, it's definitely the best in industry. Vectra AI and Darktrace do similar things, but they don't leverage the math the same way that Awake does.

As for the solution’s encrypted traffic analysis, encrypted traffic is the next nut to crack in logging and monitoring. What they're trying to look for are different cipher suites that can be used to encrypt potentially malicious traffic. It's trying to do something that no one else is really doing.

The solution helps us monitor devices used on our network by insiders, contractors, partners, and suppliers. That's the "meat and potatoes" of what the technology does. If there's a device on the network, it doesn't matter who it's owned by. If it's on the network Awake will see it.

Finally, the cloud TAPs for visibility into cloud infrastructure are 100 percent necessary. I don't know how else you're going to see it.

I would like to see a bit more in terms of encrypted traffic. With the advent of programs that live off the land, a smart attacker is going to leverage encryption to execute their operation. So I would like to see improvements there, where possible. Currently, we're not going to be decrypting encrypted traffic. What other approaches could be used?

The scalability is very strong. We are going through an acquisition. Thankfully, I have staff now. But I can go out to the new site, put an appliance there, send that traffic to a hub, and from that hub I can see all three locations that we have now, in one spot.

Awake's technical support is very good. We have a good, solid relationship with them. It's pretty stellar.

We used a SIEM, through IBM. But we're actually using Awake more than we're using QRadar, our SIEM.

The initial setup was very easy. It's a web-based GUI. It's like an application. I didn't have to build anything. All of the algorithms are built into the tech itself on the back end. Once you get traffic going through a TAP or a SPAN port, you send that traffic to the appliance and the appliance does all the work for you.

The deployment took less than a week.

Our implementation strategy was to find our core switches, run the SPAN port off those switches, and send that duplicated traffic to the appliance.

We deployed with the help of an engineer from Awake. I found them to be extremely knowledgeable.

ROI is a very hard exercise in security. I believe a couple of people have tried to come up with a quantified data point to say $2 million, or $3 million; every compromise costs a company $3.47 million. It's difficult to put a financial number on it.

I can point to the fact that we haven't had a successful compromise, and that is likely as a result of Awake's technology.

I looked at Netwitness and Darktrace. Neither of them was as capable.

The primary reason we went with Awake Security was the fact that the machine-learning was working at a different level. It was working in a manner that the other two solutions weren't. Vectra AI comes close, but it's not the same.

I try to describe it as "aggregation." Other solutions will say, "Hey, this device is doing something weird." But they don't aggregate that data point with other data points. With Awake you have what's called a "fact pattern." For example, if there's a smart toaster on the third floor that is beaconing out to an IP address in North Korea, sure that's bizarre. But if that toaster was made in North Korea it's not bizarre. Taking those two data points together, and automating something using machine-learning, is something that no other solution is doing right now. The only solution doing that is Awake. It's aggregating data points.

My advice would be to put it up against any of its competitors. Look at the salient data points. So your machine-learning is telling you that something is unusual. Great. Why? And if you don't have an answer for that then I would suggest you look at Awake. Because Awake gets to the "why."

In terms of maintenance of the solution, I've got five people now, but they don't just do this. I have one person who does security training and awareness. I have one person who does threat hunting, who is the primary user of the technology. I've got a cyber-threat intel person, and I've also got a person to monitor operational technology.

Regarding Awake's false-positive rate compared to other solutions, it's not really a SIEM. It's more of a hunting tool. It tells me something that is notable, but there will be some false positives because I don't think any amount of AI or ML is going to be able to know everything about your environment. That's just an impossibility. But it gets about as close to an actual person as you can get. Really what Awake is trying to be is a network architect or engineer, a person. It's trying to be someone who knows the topology, the exact architecture, what devices are doing what, what ports, which protocols, etc. That's really what Awake is. It's a robotic network engineer.

Compared to its competitors I'd rate it a ten out of ten. I don't think there's anything out there that's doing what it's doing.

We use it primarily for network-based security and threat-hunting across the network.

We had an incident that involved a phishing email that came in. We were able to use Awake Security to detect everybody on the network who actually went to the website linked to by the phishing email. It allowed us to take care of the infection. Whereas before, we'd have to wait and base things around user self-reporting.

It also definitely helps us monitor devices used in our network by insiders, contractors, partners, and suppliers. Everything that moves across our network, exits or moves laterally across our network, is picked up by the Awake appliance. So if anybody's using a device on our network, it's captured in the appliance.

In addition, we use Awake Security to identify and assess IoT solutions. We don't have a ton of them on our network but we are a cancer research institution so we do have scientific instruments that are internet-aware and which get their updates across the internet.

Finally, it provides us with better situational awareness. I would say there has been about a 50 percent increase there.

• I really enjoy the query language on it. It makes it very easy.
• The dashboards and displays are very intuitive.

The query language makes it easy to query the records on the network, to do searches for the various threat activities that we're looking for. The dashboard, the Security Knowledge Graph, displays information meaningfully and easily. I am able to find the information that I want to find pretty quickly.

Also, the data science capabilities of the are great. We aren't currently using it, but the behavior-based machine-learning that they do incorporate is really impressive. It's the primary reason why we picked up the product. It gives us a high-fidelity, anomaly-based detections.

I enjoy the query language, but it could be a bit more user-friendly, especially for new users who come across it. I'm conversant with the query language, but if I put it in front of somebody else they have difficulty in learning how to address the query language. That is the biggest area of room for improvement. They should push it more into a natural language style as opposed to a query language.

It's extremely stable. We have only had one minor incident which had to do it with an update. But it's very stable.

We're only using one appliance now, but it seems extremely scalable. We have plans to increase our usage of it. Within the next year, we are going to roll Awake appliances out to our remote sites as well.

Technical support is very responsive and quick to get things done. Any problems I have had with the product, they're usually contacting me about them as opposed to me contacting them. They're very proactive.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was extremely straightforward. Basically, we just plugged it in and it ran. It's an appliance, so racking is what actually took the longest. It took approximately an hour, at most.

We first started deploying it on the edge, as a PoC. We deployed it for traffic entering and exiting our network, on the edge. Then we expanded it out to traffic that's moving laterally.

We did not use a third-party.

We have seen return on investment but we don't really have the data points around that yet. It's kind of hard to quantify data points with a network security appliance. But we had zero visibility into our network before and so now we have visibility into our network.

The pricing model is an annual subscription. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We evaluated ExtraHop. There were two reasons we went with Awake Security. First, we really liked the artificial intelligence aspect of Awake with its behavioral modeling. And second, honestly, was the price. It was cheaper. We were impressed by them at the RSAC Innovation Sandbox. That's where we initially made contact with them.

ExtraHop is a standard network security appliance. The machine-learning within Awake is what sets it apart.

Make sure that you have a strong networking team in place before you buy the product, because otherwise you may have issues with the TAP aggregation. The product itself will go in quickly and easily.

We don't have the solution's encrypted traffic analysis in place because we aren't doing the decryption at the edge. But it does allow us to see the size of data, and allows us to detect external exfiltration pretty easily.

As for the false-positive rate, I haven't done the math. It's decently high because our network situation is a bit weird. But it would be about the same on any other solution.

We have one person, our Security Engineer, servicing it and maintaining it on our side. Awake maintains it on their side as well. In our environment, we have between 2,500 and 3,000 people, usually.

I would rate it at about eight out of ten. It's a matter of scale. For me, ten means it pretty much mitigates all risks for you. So it would be next to impossible to get a ten, from my perspective.

I'm primarily using it for viewing lateral movement within my network of suspicious activities. It's my internal monitoring of behaviors of endpoints inside my network, going outbound.

The way their algorithm works, they have a threat model that brings up the most concerning activities, pretty much like an analyst who is very knowledgeable. On a tier level, a Tier 4 analyst would recognize the suspicious activity. Their algorithm takes somebody who is a Tier 1 or Tier 2 and gives them that clarity at a glance. Their knowledge is pretty top-notch. I also have the added feature of having an analyst that I work with at Awake to help me interpret some of the risk, which is a top-level-analyst type of assistance.

The biggest thing it has saved me is having to bring on a high-level analyst. We're a startup company so money is very tight. I would have had to hire a Tier 3 or 4 analyst to look at our daily traffic. When we deployed this system I could put off making that hire because we're still growing the system. Now, someone like me, who doesn't have a lot of time, can take a quick glance at what's going on in my environment and know whether I need to take action or not, pretty quickly. It's saving me money, saving me time, and gives me a level of comfort that I have visibility within our network which I don't think I could get very easily any other way.

Awake Security helps me monitor devices used on my network by insiders, contractors, partners, and suppliers. We have vendors coming in all the time, we partner with people who use our WiFi access, the internet from within our environment. I have a few people who come in on my guest network and I don't know who they are, but if an incident happens I can quickly identify the systems that are concerned. A lot of times people bring systems in that aren't under my control or introduce threats in my environment which I can attribute to a visitor log right away. We have BYOD in our environment too, and I don't have control over those devices. Given that people are bringing those devices into my network, I feel a lot more comfortable that, if I get a trigger on Awake, I can quickly identify that device as belonging to one of our employees because I've seen it over a long period of time; or I can identify if it's a new device which could be a visitor or the like. I get a lot more clarity on lateral movement in my environment than I think I could any other way.

I was on a call with them looking for any encrypted traffic going on in my environment. They can spot it pretty quickly. Making sure I'm looking at encrypted traffic going outbound helps me stay in compliance

Finally, it provides me with better situational awareness. It's 1,000 times better. I spent two years in a bigger company and I never felt like I had good visibility into lateral movement. I know what it takes to get that level of visibility and this system does it almost instantaneously.

The most valuable feature is the ability to see suspicious activity for devices inside my network. It helps me to quickly identify that activity and do analysis to see if it's expected or I need to mitigate that activity quickly. One of the best use cases was when we knew that one of our vendors that came into our site had a ransomware event at their corporation. I was able to quickly find his device using the Awake system and determine that there was no threat in our system. Something like that usually would have taken four to five hours. It took me about five minutes.

Also, the Security Knowledge Graph is a display of the devices and the activities that we see. It doesn't use a heat map but it uses the size of a bubble - a circle representing a device that's probably highest on the threat list - and shows what all the connections are. That provides a great visual, at a glance, of what's going on in my environment at any one time. I really like that feature.

I use the solution to identify and assess IoT solutions, if they connect to our network. The guest network is the best example. People use the guest network to connect to the thermostat or their Apple Watch. I can see that activity. If it's a network IoT type of thing, like a call system or Amazon Echo, I'm going to see that activity on our network and Awake should be able to call that up pretty quickly.

There's room for improvement with some of the definitions, because I don't have time and I'm not a Tier 4 analyst. I believe that is something they're working towards. They're working with me to add new features to make it easier for me to tell what a threat is and determine whether it's important or not. They're making improvements and providing updates almost monthly now, so each time they make those improvements it gets clearer for me.

I started the PoC in November, 2018 and we signed a contract with them in early January, 2019. I've been using it since November, but we officially onboarded with them in early January. I'm on the current, latest version.

We've had no outages. A couple times we've had some power outages at our facilities, but it came right back up online.

Some of what we're working on now is getting our satellite offices redirected. If I worked for a larger company it would be harder to get this implemented in all of our sites. It's good, site-per-site. I'm still trying to figure out how I can get some visibility into the satellite, small, one- and two-man offices. They're working with me to help come up with that solution.

Right now, it really requires having your internet traffic go through it to have the right level of visibility. For a bigger company that's a little more challenging, depending on how the corporate environment is structured. In my old company, we had 80 different ways to get the internet. That was challenging in and of itself. This company is much smaller so I don't have that big of a challenge, but I do have some satellite offices and I need to figure out how to redirect that traffic through this system so I get some level of visibility there.

Usually, when I have an issue where I don't understand what I'm seeing, they're pretty responsive in trying to work on ways to make that clearer. I've been pretty happy with that.

Technical support is definitely a ten out of ten. They've been very responsive and very knowledgeable and usually get right to the heart of any concerns I have.

At this company, we did not have a previous solution, but I've used other systems, SIEMs for looking outward-in, like QRadar. That was our system at my previous company. The challenge I saw with something like QRadar was that it was outside looking in. It was looking at our border alerts on our firewalls and looking into our network. An analyst would take those alerts and try to trace to the endpoint that might be causing the problem or that was connected to the problem. He would take the alerts early in the morning, spend about four hours tracing everything that needed to be traced, and then finally get into the endpoint. Awake takes the opposite approach and looks at the endpoints that have the most concerning activity and bubbles that up to the top.

I tell people it saves me about four hours' worth of analyst work daily. I can look at it in five minutes and know which endpoints are of concern, and then I spend a few minutes analyzing whether that's activity that I expected or did not expect, and I can move on. I can look at it daily and get a good feel for whether I need to address something, or I've learned that that alert is not really of concern because it's expected activity.

We got to Awake Security because someone recommended it. One of the consultants I work with had a connection with Awake. They said, "Hey, look at this company." I gave them a call; they came out and did a demo really quickly and then we set up a PoC to see if it worked in our environment. Almost instantaneously, my IT manager and I loved the system because of the visibility we could get so quickly.

The initial setup was pretty easy. They came in and deployed a server on site. We had to make sure that we had the right VLANs exposed to the server so that we could see all the traffic. The user interface was pretty straightforward, just a sign on and password to the server. 

It was pretty intuitive to look at the different threat pictures that they had on the site. It automatically populates the most concerning ones at the top, so I adapted to it very quickly. The search features were pretty good. When I wasn't seeing what I needed to on the automated displays, I could use the menu to clip through a device or just look for a domain or for something that I knew might be concerning. For one incident, when I was trying to find a vendor who had an issue at their shop and I knew they had visited us, I just searched for their domain in our environment. It popped up and it showed me their device pretty quickly. It was a five-minute turnaround, which typically would have taken me a whole lot longer.

There was about a day of install and then about another day of initial setup. Then there was a little bit of tweaking we had to do when we weren't seeing all of the traffic that we thought we should be seeing, but that was on our end. That was just a matter of working with their team to tune the deployment for the server.

For our implementation strategy, we just connected to a SPAN port on our exit router at our main facility. Then we had to tune it to make sure all the VLANs that we had internally were going through that SPAN port. We had to set up a server, and we set it up in our server rack; we happened to have room which was nice. It only took up one or two U's. It wasn't very big.

Initially, to deploy it, I needed my IT staff and it took one network engineer. To maintain is really nothing. It's me using the system. Everything else has been remotely controlled by Awake, so there's been no need for us to interface with it, once deployed.

Awake Security assisted us with deployment. They were great, very responsive.

When you compare the cost of hiring and retaining a sophisticated analyst, the Awake Security Platform pays for itself in a matter of months and goes on to save me money, longer-term. In addition, finding an analyst of that caliber in this market can be a challenge in itself. 

The bottom line is that this solution not only gives me the peace of mind and the same level of comfort as having an uber analyst, it also allows me to defer hiring for longer.

The other options were very expensive. Most of them were deploying endpoint agents, which was something I didn't really want to do, just yet. Endpoint agents usually help you off-prem, but I was more concerned about what was going on on-prem, and Awake seemed to be the best solution, the most complete solution we could get in the short-term, without spending a lot of money.

My advice would certainly be to do a PoC to make sure it works in your environment. The way your network is configured is going to have a big impact on whether this tool works for you. If you can't get your traffic to go through a single or a reasonable number of exit points to the internet, it may not be a complete solution for you. When I was working at that larger company, I probably would have used this in our engineering lab environment because those guys were like the "Wild West" and deployed whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, and that was usually my biggest concern. I probably would have deployed something like this because it would have given me the visibility, what I couldn't see at the firewall level. I would need to see at a router level and needed something they could make sense of for me. I think Awake would have done it very quickly without much effort.

It's my main tool for network security right now. I'm using it very extensively. We're trying to reconfigure, because we're a startup and I don't want to buy another system, to get as much as we can out of this current system, but I would plan to use this as we grow as a company. If we were to grow globally, I could see us using Awake as our primary threat intelligence for lateral movement particularly, in our environment.

In terms of cloud infrastructure and Awake seeing that activity, it only sees it on-prem because that's the way we have it deployed. Any connection to a cloud, like AWS, we will see that. We should be able to see what activities' connections are occurring. If it's encrypting from the browser to the cloud, we may see that activity but I don't know if we can pull out the content unless we break encryption before it gets to that device. There are certain cloud connections that make sense in our environment and others that don't. We don't use AWS, so any AWS going outbound would be something of concern. I'd go to that device or that individual to see what they're making those connections for.

I don't know how to count how many false positives I get. Usually, I'm looking at concerning activity and it's up to me to determine if it is expected or not expected. Generally, it is exactly what I want to see because it's at the device level that I want to know if the activity is expected or not. Generally, it ends up being expected. It's hard to give it a false-positive rating because I would guess about half of them are things I expect to see. But as a system goes, it's almost 100 percent accurate in calling those events out. It hasn't called out events where I would say, "Oh, it didn't need to call that out because that activity shouldn't have been flagged."

It doesn't know what I know about what's normal, so there's still a little bit of knowing what's normal in your environment. That's the onus of the person running the environment. I can tell Awake that something is normal and not to look at that again, so there is that tuning aspect that has to happen. I typically don't tune it out because I want to see any new traffic patterns. If it's a regular backup that's about the only time I will say, "Don't ever worry about it coming from this device because I expect that to happen on a regular basis."

The false-positive resolution with Awake Security is so much faster that it doesn't have as big an impact as it would have on another solution. If you gave me a false positive with a SIEM, I would have to invest four hours to find out that it was a false positive. If you give me a false positive on Awake, I have to spend five to ten minutes to figure it out. That's because the data is right there. It's populating for me and it's easy to search. It's almost not a fair marker to look at a false-positive rate because the resolution time for the false positive is so much shorter.

Overall, I would rate this solution at ten out of ten.

We use the solution for security purposes. If there is a threat in the network, they try to detect it. Arista products have sensors on their hardware. You don't need to add additional sensors to the network to investigate. A customer sees their traffic for a foreign or suspicious attack on the site.

The solution enables us to see every action in their network in the dashboard. They can take action automatically or manually if there are suspicious things in the network. 

There is no need for additional sensors. You can directly use Arista hardware in your network. It is easy to manage.

The solution should improve their direction, detection, and prevention.

I have been using Arista NDR as a partner for one year. We are using the latest version of the solution.

If you need more investigation, you should add more Arista sensors. It is easily scalable. If you do not use Arista, you should put new sensors. There's only one difficulty in getting traffic to your sensor. If customers can do it, it is very easy.

Customers and government departments in Turkey prefer Arista NDR.

In Turkey, there is always a technical team solving a problem. It is easy to reach the international team. They help us without a problem. The support team is good. They have L3 engineers working for many years in their IT team.

The initial setup is easy. You put Arista devices in the network as normal devices, and the VLAN traffic is passing on it. It requires two people to complete the process and takes a maximum of a day.

The solution's maintenance is easy. You can upgrade and downgrade the software easily because it is modular. You can easily upgrade from one version to another without taking the Middle Path upgrade.

You must use the solution for six months to investigate what's happening in the network.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The use cases for the product are similar to other network protection solutions, focusing on NDR. The key advantage lies in its visibility on the network, providing more insight compared to other technologies, especially when strategically positioned.

Arista NDR's scalability is very good, making it easy to add more hardware components. You can order additional hardware and integrate it by stacking it with the existing setup. This feature cannot be seen in other NDR tools. 

We conducted a proof of value for one of our customers with Arista NDR. In comparison to other NDR solutions, our customer found that Arista NDR provided detailed information that other vendors couldn't match. While I can't speak for all NDR solutions, based on our feedback and customer satisfaction, Arista NDR stands out. It offers enhanced visibility and gathers richer details, making our customers more satisfied with the results.

The tool's real-time traffic analysis helps my clients improve security. 

Arista NDR needs to open legal offices to be closer to customers and partners. It needs more visibility in the NDR market in the Middle East. While they are doing well, they lack sufficient engineers. They need to hire more engineers to meet the demand and expand their presence. The current team is good but not enough to fully capture the market.

The support experience has been positive so far. Although we haven't directly engaged with the technical support team, the presales engineer and solution architect have been highly supportive.

The solution is worth its money. 

The tool's pricing is expensive but it is competitive. 

Initially, there were some difficulties with Arista NDR, but they are addressing and improving the situation. The current NDR solution is the result of an acquisition from a company called Awake Security. It is committed to resolving issues and making the platform easier.

If you have Arista switches, integrating them with Arista NDR offers additional benefits. When Arista NDR is integrated with these switches, it provides enhanced visibility. Arista switches have a dedicated processor for NDR, acting like a small module within their software or hardware. It offers better results. 

The product's integration with existing infrastructure is good. There is some fine-tuning required which already it is working on. 

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.