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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
7.1
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (5th), Network Detection and Response (NDR) (2nd), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (18th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (10th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (6th)
 

Featured Reviews

Olivier CHAMBELANT - PeerSpot reviewer
Beneficial cloud deployment
Opening a ticket with support can be difficult but once it is open the support does a good job. They want us to provide a lot of information, such as the order number and when it was bought. It takes a long time, they can improve by having a faster response time.
Mohammad Alkurdi - PeerSpot reviewer
Innovative detection features enhance monitoring
The advantages of the integration are not entirely out-of-the-box. You have to do it manually. When I'm doing tier response, an out-of-the-box solution is not available. You need to have a Linux server, and from the Linux server, you must perform AI tasks, and there is a lot to be handled in the back end. This is a major consideration about them. The recall feature, if it can be placed in some areas instead of the cloud, and charged for, would be better. Recall the storage where you watch all the traffic, and you can recall it and try to analyze it in the back end. It’s cloud-based. If they offer it on-prem, it would be better. I think they have a solution, but I have never tested it, to be honest with you.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"It's important for us that the user interface is easy to understand and that is the biggest benefit we see from Vectra AI."
"The most useful feature is the anomaly detection because it's not signature-based. It picks up the initial part of any attack, like the recon and those aspects of the kill chain, very well."
"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..."
"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."
"Vectra produces actionable data using automation. That has helped us. It's less manpower now to look at incidents, which has definitely increased efficiency. Right now, in a lot of cases, our mean time to detection is within zero days. This tells me by the time something happened, and we were able to detect it, it was within the same day."
"One of the most valuable features of the platform is its ability to provide you with aggregated risk scores based on impact and certainty of threats being detected. This is both applied to individual and host detections. This is important because it enables us to use this platform to prioritize the most likely imminent threats. So, it reduces alert fatigue follow ups for security operation center analysts. It also provides us with an ability to prioritize limited resources."
"Cognito Streams gives you a detailed view of what happens in the network in the form of rich metadata. It is just a super easy way to capture network traffic for important protocols, giving us an advantage. This is very helpful on a day-to-day basis."
"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."
 

Cons

"The product's price is high."
"The initial setup of Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud is complex."
"The product needs to improve its user-friendliness. It is very tricky and you need to study it before using the standard functionalities."
"The initial setup is a bit complex in terms of deployment and configuration"
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The UI/UX and detection could be improved. More detections of specific security events could be useful. We've had a few incidents that were not detected by Vectra. The teams are working on it right now, but more detection is always better."
"The false positives and the tuning side of it is something that could use improvement. But that could be from our side."
"There is room for improvement in the documentation. We would like to have more details on how it detects what we see."
"The solution needs to become more proactive. When Vectra AI is the primary solution in an environment - like it is in our case - you must work on response time. We have a small team so response time at endpoint level is vital."
"In comparison with a lot of systems I used in the past, the false positives are really a burden because they are taking a lot of time at this moment."
"Vectra is still limited to packet management. It's only monitoring packet exchanges. While it can see a lot of things, it can't see everything, depending on where it's deployed. It has its limits and that's why I still have my SIEM."
"The solution has not reduced the security analyst workload in our organization because we still need to SIEM. Unfortunately, while Vectra, for us, is a brilliant tool for network investigations, giving wonderful visibility, it doesn't go the whole way to replace our SIEM that is needed for compliance. So, I still have the same amount of alerting and logging that I did before. It gives us more defined ability to see incidents, but it doesn't give us enough information to satisfy a PCI or 27001 audit."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud is an expensive enterprise solution."
"The price of Cisco Stealthwatch Cloud is expensive."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"The upfront pricing model that we have would have been more beneficial if it had been a recurring license fee, but that wasn't a massive issue for us. It's fairly priced."
"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."
"The pricing is very good. It's less expensive than many of the tools out there."
"The solution's pricing was 50 percent lower than the other vendors shortlisted."
"We are running at about 90,000 pounds per year. The solution is a licensed cost. The hardware that they gave us was pretty much next to nothing. It is the license that we're paying for."
"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."
"There are additional features that can be purchased in addition to the standard licensing fee, such as Cognito Recall and Stream."
"Their licensing model is antiquated. I'm not a fan of their licensing model. We have to pay for licensing based on four different things. You have to pay based on the number of unique IPs, the number of logs that we send through Recall and Stream, and the size of our environment. They need to simplify their licensing down to just one thing. It should be based on the amount of data, the number of devices, or something else, but there should be just one thing for everything. That's what they need to base their licensing on. Cost-wise, they're not cheap. They were definitely the most expensive option, but you get what you pay for. They're not the cheapest option."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
32%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
University
9%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
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 Enterprise27
 

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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