What is our primary use case?
It's an endpoint in EDR, so our primary use case is for threat detection and remediation for Linux, Windows, and Mac.
How has it helped my organization?
The best example of how it has helped is that we can do searches via the API. And so we have our automation tool do a lot of searches automatically based on alerts so that when the SOC analyst goes to review, they have a lot of the information already pulled for them.
It leverages indicators of behavior as a means of detecting attacks. It's very good at detection. It's not so great at prevention. They're a very detection-focused company. So that may or may not work in your environment depending on if you're a prevention-based organization or detection-based.
The leveraging of indicators of behavior helps remediate against attacks faster. One of the things we can do is if we have a process or a hash or something that we know is bad, it's very quick to search for it across the environment. And then we can either have Cybereason yank the file off, quarantine it, or whatever we think we need to do based on the severity of the issue.
Cybereason is helpful to organizations with a small security team. With a single portal to manage and with it being a cloud portal, it really reduces the amount of overhead versus having a traditional on-prem solution.
What is most valuable?
Their EDR solution, the ability to mitigate issues through their command line, is probably the best feature that we've had. We use that all the time. It's very useful for doing investigations.
Cybereason helps us to mitigate and isolate on the fly. It's extremely important and mostly because the endpoint is our weakest link. It's what has access to our internal network in the external world. So it's the biggest target.
We have used it to automate mitigation and isolation processes. The automation that we're doing is a little bit less featured than the product we had before, but there's a lot more you can do with automation than what you can do with a traditional endpoint.
It somewhat provides an operation-centric approach to security that enables us to instantly visualize an entire malicious operation from the root cause to every affected endpoint in real-time. We have several open issues and bug reports with them that it doesn't always pull that data back. So when it works, it does pull a lot of the details, but some of the things like PowerShell Commands are still very limited with what you can see. It's extremely important to us.
The solution enables us to adapt to attacks and act more swiftly than attackers can adjust their tactics, especially with EDR. We've been able to do a lot more scripting and automation for doing mitigation.
We use the solution's XDR features to extend detection and response capabilities across the broader IT ecosystem. We're basically covering most of our non-appliance infrastructure and some of our appliances. Even network appliances would fall into what we can cover with it.
What needs improvement?
The dashboards are very minimal. They have some flashy options but there's nothing that we've found that's actually valuable that's in the dashboard. It's very easy to use, but if you have experienced SOC members there's no real query language. So it slows them down to have to click the button a million times, but for new SOC members, it's very easy to pick up because there's no query language.
Compared to our previous endpoint, we have a lot more false positives and a lot more duplication of alerts. So we're chasing more alerts.
It doesn't always pull data, there'll be times when it can't pull a process or things like that. We brought this up to Cybereason. We have an RFP for it but we have a lot of RFPs and we maybe only had a couple that have been completed.
The high CPU and memory usage are the two main points that need improvement. That's been pretty big. It's caused us a couple of outages. If they had more automation, like policy management via the API, that would be nice because whitelisting path exceptions, things like that, do take a good amount of time because that's done manually per policy instead of being automated. And we're very automation-focused.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Cybereason for almost a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Stability can definitely be improved for a cloud service. You expect a certain amount of uptime and you expect when they're doing upgrades on the system, that it's going to be transparent to the end-users. But with their current configuration, if they do an upgrade on our servers, we have seven hours of down time.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's very scalable. We've been able to roll out. When we went global to a very big chunk and it was very easy to do.
In our office, we have around 25,000 users. When we went global, we gained about 100,000 and then we just went private again a couple of weeks ago. So we're back down to 25,000. We've maxed out at a hundred and we're consistent in around 25.
Around 30 people on the security engineering, the SOC, threat hunting, and incident response teams use it.
How are customer service and support?
The support people are very helpful, but a lot of the issues end up having to go back to engineering or their support teams. Then once that happens, it takes a long time and it can often take a long time to get to the point where they can even open a ticket with engineering.
The last bug that we reported, it was probably about six weeks before they were able to open the ticket with the engineering team.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used CrowdStrike. We switched because of the cost. We ended up doing more of a global licensing, which added something like 100,000 endpoints for our global contract, so the little bit of price difference ended up becoming quite large.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward. You just install the client and as long as it has internet access, you're pretty much already working at that point, and then it's just fine-tuning your policies or your groupings after that.
We had the majority of our assets done, probably 20,000 in a month for our office. So it was very quick.
We have an automation tool that we use for patching and installing software, and we just did a phased approach of rolling it out to end clients and servers.
What was our ROI?
It's really good at finding adware, so we have been able to get our environment cleaned up by removing adware and other software like that. That's probably been the biggest value we've seen so far.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Make sure that the product actually meets what you need. We are finding some of the features that brought the price down because it was included like the firewall control, which was a big need of ours and most other vendors tack on a hefty charge for firewall control, that actually isn't full firewall control and it's not the functionality that we needed.
So if we had known that at the beginning, maybe we would've looked a little further because we were thinking that was the biggest cost savings and it's not been as functional as we were hoping.
There are no additional costs to standard licensing. The one nice thing is where a lot of other vendors will nickel and dime you with the features, with Cybereason you pretty much get everything.
What other advice do I have?
My advice would be to make sure that your company's goals align. If you're a detect-focused organization you'll probably be very happy with it. If you're a prevent-based organization, I don't think it's going to fill that niche.
If you have a smaller team, look at what it takes to manage the policies, because depending on your workflows, how you need to patch, or how you need to group things, it may not work for your workflows.
I would rate Cybereason a six out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor. The reviewer's company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Strategic Partners