ExtraHop Reveal(x) vs Vectra AI comparison

ExtraHop Reveal(x) is a highly effective network traffic analysis (NTA) solution that leverages a cloud-native architecture to empower organizations to overcome a world filled with increasingly sophisticated threats. It identifies 25% more threats than its competitors. Additionally, organizations that employ Reveal(x) say they resolve issues 77% percent faster than they would if they were using other similar solutions.

ExtraHop Reveal(x) Benefits

Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy ExtraHop Reveal(x) include:

• Total network visibility. Reveal(x) gives users the ability to view every component of their network and devices connected to it in real time. It can automatically recognize and classify the devices that are communicating across an organization’s network. These devices are scanned by powerful decryption software that reveals hidden threats and the details of critical transactions without compromising privacy or compliance rules. Organizations are given full East-West visibility across both physical data centers and cloud environments. Threats that are on the periphery are brought to the attention of the administrators tasked with watching out for them.

• Identify threats in real time. Reveal(x) extracts more than 5,000 features from the L2-L7 security layers at any given time, feeds them into its machine learning engine, and presents them to its rule-based detection feature. These features make it possible for the solution to identify the most severe threats. Users can conduct a threat triage and address the threats that their system detects in the order of severity that these threats represent.

• Ease of use. Users of Reveal(x) can easily make full use of its event remediation features without expending long periods of time learning them. Its workflows are designed so that administrators can go from a security event to the cause of the event in only a couple of clicks. What would normally take hours can be completed in moments.

ExtraHop Reveal(x) Features

• Integration suite. Reveal(x) enables users to utilize a robust suite of integrations. If users feel they are missing important capabilities, they can bolster their security feature toolbox with those offered by third-party solutions. Phantom, Splunk, and Palo Alto are three examples of solutions that Reveal(x) enables users to connect to in order to fill in a gap in their security capabilities.

• Automated inventory. Reveal(x) automatically creates a detailed inventory of all of the devices that it discovers and classifies. This keeps an always up-to-date record of all of the devices that are communicating in a given network.
  
  
• Machine learning. Reveal(x)’s real-time application analytics is driven by a machine learning engine. It detects anomalies in an organization’s network traffic, thus enabling users to keep ahead of any and all threats while reducing the number of false positives that administrators have to sort through.

Reviews from Real Users

ExtraHop Reveal(x) is a solution that stands out when compared to many other similar solutions. Two major advantages that it offers are its versatility and its ability to quickly identify the root cause of an application’s issues.

John B., the senior monitoring engineer at a financial services firm, says, “It's useful for different teams in our organization. The cybersecurity team uses it because it has got great analytics for anomaly detection, malware detection, and ransomware. It's used by the networking people because it's great to be able to get the three-way handshake between systems to see how your network is doing. The microservices for DNS use it because they like to be able to see how their DNS services are operating and how many DNS requests are being rejected, denied, or dropped. Application people love it because it fully decrypts their traffic.

Henry S., a systems engineer at LifePoint Health, writes, "When there are performance issues with an HTTP app, ExtraHop enables us to identify the causes within a few minutes. We can see what transactions are being impacted by something that may be happening within the server environment."

Vectra threat detection and response is a complete cybersecurity platform that collects, detects, and prioritizes security alerts. The Cognito platform for Network Detection and Response (NDR) detects and responds to attacks inside cloud, data center, Internet of Things, and enterprise networks. The platform also provides automated response capabilities for low-level threats and escalates more severe anomalies to security personnel.

Cognito captures data for multiple relevant sources and enriches it with context and security insights. It starts by deploying sensors across different networks in datacenters, IoT, or enterprise networks. The algorithm extracts relevant metadata from network and cloud traffic. The information can also be non-security information that can help investigation. 

The data is enriched with security context to support critical use cases, such as threat detection, investigation, hunting and compliance. The platform is machine learning-based, which enables it to adapt to any new and current threat scenario. It detects, clusters, prioritizes, and anticipates attacks by using identity and host-level enforcement. 

With the Vectra platform, a person can investigate 50 threats in just two hours. By prioritizing alerts and leveraging threat intelligence, it provides faster results.Vectra solves today’s security challenges for network detection and response. 

One of Vectra’s best features is the emphasis they put in pairing research and data science for security insights. It offers behavior codification with unsupervised, supervised, and deep learning models. 

The pricing is according to a subscription model with a free trial available.Vectra is available for Office 365, Azure AD and AWS Brain.

Features of Vectra AI

• AI-based threat detection and response. 
• Detects attacks in real time with behavior-based threat detection. 
• Consolidates and correlates thousands of events, detecting threats. 
• Enriches threat investigation with a chain of evidence and data science security insights. 
• Machine learning techniques, including deep learning and neural networks. 
• Gives visibility into cyberattackers and analyzes all network traffic. 
• Continuous updates with new threat detection algorithms. 
• Provides encryption at rest and in transit. For the AWS version, it offers AES-256 encryption via AWS Key Management Service. 
• Guaranteed availability according to the SLA of the service selected. 
• Does not connect to public sector networks. 

Benefits of Vectra AI

• Behavioral models use AI to find unknown attackers. 
• Context increases the accuracy of threat hunting. 
• Allows for proactive action by prioritizing the most relevant information. 
• Provides a clear picture and extensive context for investigations. 
• Aids decision-making in the incident response process. 
• Helps working with large datasets by capturing metadata at scale. 
• Automates time-consuming analysis. 
• Reduces the security analysts’ workloads on threat investigations. 

Other advantages of Vectra services include that they can be deployed in the public, private, or hybrid cloud. Support is available via email or online ticketing with an average of 4 hours of response. Phone support is available 24/7. 

Vectra provides full on-site and online training and documentation. Regarding the user interface, it supports several types of web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. However, it is not available for mobile devices.

Reviews from Real Users

Here’s what PeerSpot users of Vectra AI have to say about it:

"One of the core features is that Vectra AI triages threats and correlates them with compromised host devices. From a visibility perspective, we can better track the threat across the network. Instead of us potentially finding one device that has been impacted without Vectra AI, it will give us the visibility of everywhere that threat went. Therefore, visibility has increased for us." - Dave W., Operations Manager at a healthcare company

"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.” - T.S., Senior Security Engineer at a manufacturing company