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Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics [EOL] vs Vectra AI comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Secure Cloud Analytic...
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Vectra AI
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
47
Ranking in other categories
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (4th), Network Detection and Response (NDR) (2nd), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (15th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (11th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)
 

Featured Reviews

SP
Security Analyst at Orange España
Efficiently generates alerts for suspicious activities and scales easily
There are two areas of improvement. Firstly, extend the log retrieval limit to at least three months. For example, there is a limit on the number of log messages that can be received. So, I would like to expand the log retrieval limit. And another thing, if we migrate these things to an event or send us an email if there is any critical event, I would like to configure these things on the initial launch. Because if a system is compromised, there will be a lot of data movement from one post to another post to the outside. Then, we should also get an alert on email as well. We have since we have integrated these things. But a direct email for critical alerts should be there. So, I would like to enhance the critical event configuration. If a new user wants to learn how it should work, how policies work, and where we can configure policies, there should be some learning material for this product.
RR
Consultant at a retailer with 5,001-10,000 employees
Threat detection has improved and malicious emails are now identified quickly
Vectra AI offers artificial intelligence capabilities with visibility that can be integrated into our day-to-day operations and other tools, including malware detection tools and cyber threat tools. Vectra AI has positively impacted my organization. Last year while using it, we received many malicious email threats and virus incidents, including a trojan virus that had reportedly been deployed by someone. Our company used Vectra AI to detect the malicious threats and viruses before they could cause more damage, and we successfully stopped the threats. Using Vectra AI, I notice that server downtime has decreased significantly. We now experience only two to three hours of downtime, whereas without Vectra AI and other tools, our downtime would exceed 48 to 72 hours.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It tells you if there is any communication going to command and control servers, or if there is any traffic that violates your internal policy, or if any data hoarding is happening where data is being dumped from your machine to outside of the environment. It provides all such meaningful reports to help you understand what's happening."
"When it comes to scalability, there's no size limit. It varies based on licenses and requirements."
"The tool's best feature is its ability to monitor network traffic. It will also inform users whether the traffic generated by a network is legitimate. The tool helps to capture and analyze the network traffic."
"The product helps me to see malware."
"Monitoring the traffic, making sure you have the visibility."
"Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud is scalable because it is on the cloud."
"The logs in Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud are very good when doing the API integration in the team. It is able to give you important information for the correlations."
"The solution's ability to reduce alerts, by rolling up numerous alerts to create a single incident or campaign, helps in that it collapses all the events to a particular host, or a particular detection to a set of hosts. So it doesn't generate too many alerts. By and large, whatever alerts it generates are actionable, and actionable within the day."
"It has reduced the time it takes to respond to attacks. That comes back to the proactive point. It makes us able to lower down in the kill chain, we can react now, rather than reacting to incidents that happened, we can see an instant, in some cases, as it's being implemented, or as it's being launched."
"Vectra AI can bring the ability to detect intrusion on the network more so than legacy IDS tools."
"Vectra AI generates relevant information."
"It does a reliable job of parsing out the logs of all the network traffic so that we can ingest them into our SIEM and utilize them for threat hunting and case investigations. It is pretty robust and reliable. The administration time that we spend maintaining it or troubleshooting it is very low. So, the labor hour overhead is probably our largest benefit from it. We spend 99% of our time in Vectra investigating cases, responding to incidents, or hunting, and only around 1% of our time is spent patching, troubleshooting, or doing anything else. That's our largest benefit from Vectra."
"It's easy to manage, and I love the UX. It's very well designed. When we are looking for something, it's quite easy to find it."
"We particularly like the user experience around the dashboard, which we find to be much more straightforward than the dashboard of some of the competitive products... Vectra is a really easy system to understand and use to prioritize where we need to focus our security resources."
"It gives you access, with Recall, to instant visibility into your network through something like a SIEM solution. For us, being able to correlate all of this network data without having to manage it, has provided immediate value. It gives us the ability to really work on the stuff where I and my team have expertise, instead of having to manage a SIEM solution..."
 

Cons

"The initial setup is a bit complex in terms of deployment and configuration"
"The initial setup of Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud is complex."
"If we migrate these things to an event or send us an email if there is any critical event, I would like to configure these things on the initial launch. Because if a system is compromised, there will be a lot of data movement from one post to another post to the outside. Then, we should also get an alert on email as well. We have since we have integrated these things. But a direct email for critical alerts should be there. So, I would like to enhance the critical event configuration."
"The product's price is high."
"When I used to work on it, I just didn't see anything new happening for about a year and a half. Providing newer data and newer reports constantly would help. There should be more classifications and more interesting data."
"Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud could improve the graphical user interface. It could be a more user-friendly graphical user interface. so that. Not everybody's a cyber security professional, most of the customers that I deal with are not very skilled. The terms that they use in the solution are quite understandable for a normal CIO."
"The product needs to improve its user-friendliness. It is very tricky and you need to study it before using the standard functionalities."
"I'd like to be able to get granular reports and to be able to output them into formats that are customizable and more useful. The reporting GUI is lacking."
"We had another product with Vectra AI and used the MDR solution as an add-on. Initially, it wasn't fully appropriately configured, so we didn't get the expected results. Even once configured correctly, we weren't fully satisfied with its response. The issue was both with their service response and the product's capabilities."
"I would like to see a bit more strategic metrics instead of technical data. Information that I could show to my executive management team or board would be valuable."
"Integration with other security components needs improvement. It should have true integration as opposed to just being a separate pane of glass."
"The false positives and the tuning side of it is something that could use improvement. But that could be from our side."
"They use a proprietary logging format that is probably 90% similar to Bro Logs. Their biggest area of improvement is finishing out the remaining 10%. That 10% might not be beneficial to their ML engine, but that's fine. The industry standard is Zeek Logs or Bro Logs, or Bro or Zeek, depending on how old you are. While they have 90% of those fields, they're still missing some fields. In very rare instances, some community rules do not have the fields that they need, and we had to modify community rules for our logs. So, their biggest area of improvement would be to just finish their matching of the Zeek standard."
"Multiple appliances are required for Vectra AI, making it less convenient compared to competitors."
"In education as a sector, we are looking at AI a lot in terms of how it can be used as part of the teaching and learning side of things. It would be great to have Vectra AI look at a better way to enhance the security posture related to the AI tools in our portfolio."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is quite expensive."
"Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud is an expensive enterprise solution."
"The price of Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud is expensive."
"At the time of purchase, we found the pricing acceptable. We had an urgency to get something in place because we had a minor breach that occurred at the tail end of 2016 to the beginning of 2017. This indicated we had a lack of ability to detect things on the network. Hence, why we moved quickly to get into the tool in place. We found things like Bitcoin mining and botnets which we closed quickly. In that regard, it was worth the money."
"The solution's pricing was 50 percent lower than the other vendors shortlisted."
"We have a desire to increase our use. However, it all comes down to budget. It's a very expensive tool that is very difficult to prove business support for. We would like to have two separate networks. We have our corporate network and PCI network, which is segregated due to payment processing. We don't have it for deployed in the PCI network. It would be good to have it fully deployed there to provide us with additional monitoring and control, but the cost associated with their licensing model makes it prohibitively expensive to deploy."
"Vectra is a bit on the higher side in terms of price, but they have always been transparent. The reason that they are this good is that they invest, so they need to charge accordingly."
"From a licensing perspective, the Vectra detect platform is pretty doable. Also, the hardware prices are nothing that we're not used to. The stream part is a little overpriced compared to the detect part. The reason is that you need to stream data to detect events anyway, so the data is in there. The only thing that's not available is the UI to be able to look at the stream data, which is also on the appliances but is just not activated. That's mainly the thing that we want to improve on."
"Vectra's pricing is too high. All schools will not be able to afford it. Vectra will only end up targeting higher education and higher value independence purely because of the price. A lot of schools would love to have a product like Vectra AI, but they simply can't because they struggle to even pay the high E5 licensing from Microsoft. When you're up against that, Vectra AI is never going to be within the sector's price range."
"Vectra AI's pricing is cheaper than that of Darktrace."
"The license is based on the concurrent IP addresses that it's investigating. We have 9,800 to 10,000 IP addresses."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Government
8%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise29
 

Questions from the Community

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What is the biggest difference between Corelight and Vectra AI?
The two platforms take a fundamentally different approach to NDR. Corelight is limited to use cases that require the eventual forwarding of events and parsed data logs to a security team’s SIEM or ...
What do you like most about Vectra AI?
The solution is currently used as a central threat detection and response system.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Vectra AI?
It is very acceptable when you compare it with Darktrace, for example.
 

Also Known As

Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud, Observable Networks
Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Options, Schneider Electric, Washington University in St Louis, Gotcha, Kraft Kennedy, PartnerRe, Sumologic, Veterans United, AFGE, Agraform, Artesys, Dynamic Ideas Financials, Department of Agriculture and Commerce
Tribune Media Group, Barry University, Aruba Networks, Good Technology, Riverbed, Santa Clara University, Securities Exchange, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association
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