USM Anywhere Reviews

The use case is for companies that want to have more visibility in their environment and want to apply governance. This solution is used for compliance management, vulnerability management, threat hunting, and threat protection.

I think all of the features are valuable. However, the most valuable feature is vulnerability management because it gives you insight into your environment to know what systems need to be updated or patched. You can avoid weaknesses in the computers and other systems by keeping them patched.

I think they need to broaden their compliance management to cover more areas of compliance. For example, they're very specific about HIPAA, CIS 8.0, and a few others, but they don't have a broad compliance management base. Some customers need compliance management with other standards or frameworks, which are unavailable on their platform. I want to see more compliance management capability because if they broadened it, it would be a much more attractive product. 

They have a lot of integrations, which is good, but the quality of integrations seems to be a little bit low. It's one thing to provide integration, and it's another to provide integration that works really well.

The solution is cloud-based and hybrid. A server is put into a customer's environment to collect information and send it to the cloud. Both the server installed in the customer's environment and the cloud solution are scalable. The solution has rapid elasticity and all the check marks a cloud-based solution needs to scale. It is definitely scalable.

There are currently 19 users in our company. I think over time we have plans to increase our usage of this solution, but as an MSP, we have clients with different requirements or needs, so we might pick a different solution because it's a better fit.  

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It wasn't that difficult.

The initial steps of the implementation, getting the account and setting it up, only take a few hours. Then there's some fine-tuning that takes place afterward, and it takes a little bit longer. You need about a week to really get that fully configured with a good plan and deployed in the environment, and then from there, it's just fine-tuning as you go.

We handled the deployment in-house. The solution needs one person for deployment and one for management.

I don't recall exactly what their prices are, but they are a little more expensive than Microsoft. It really depends on what features in Microsoft you may already be using. If, for example, you're a company that has Microsoft's Defender for Endpoint and Defender for Identity, or basically any of their Defender Suite applications, you might already be paying a certain amount every month or every year for those features that the Microsoft Sentinel solution brings under one umbrella.

AlienVault also has additional fees for extra storage in the cloud. 

Recently, we were going to sell a customer AlienVault, but then they picked Microsoft Sentinel. We compared them because we wanted to make sure that  both solutions could do the same thing, and it turns out that Microsoft does it a little bit better.

It's like having a Swiss Army knife that has all of the tools you need to do a craft, or just having a regular pocketknife that you can only use to do one thing. In this case, AT&T is the pocketknife and Microsoft is the Swiss Army knife.

My advice would be to make sure the product is a good fit in terms of compliance and compatibility with your security solution, like your EDR and ATP solutions. Make sure that they play well together because you could have issues with the two fighting each other over protecting the computers.

I would rate this solution as a seven out of ten. 

It's a good product. They created AlienVault based off of an open source framework, so it's built on OSSIM. It's interesting that AT&T is going into the cybersecurity market since they're a huge mobile carrier. Right now, their marketing and advertisements are really good, but they need to invest more money into the product. If they focus more on building out the product, maybe invest a little bit more money into development, I think they'll have a stronger strategy and a very dominant winning solution in the market.

I have used AT&T AlienVault USM for Log collection and management, priority, and incident analysis.

AT&T AlienVault USM has helped our organization by highlighting known vulnerabilities in our network and full visibility of our network to figure out if there is anything that we are not aware of. If there are any missing pieces, they would be found by the AT&T AlienVault USM.

The most valuable feature in AT&T AlienVault USM is the reporting.

AT&T AlienVault USM can improve searchable data. It should be available for more than 90 days. If you need more than 90 days of data, you have to put a request and they give you raw data, which is not easy to search. A good addition would be to allow users to search data older than 90 days.

In a future update, they should add more integrations with third-party devices.

I have been using AT&T AlienVault USM for approximately six months.

AT&T AlienVault USM is stable.

The scalability of AT&T AlienVault USM is good.

We have five IT administrators that use it. We plan to increase the usage in the future.

We don't reach out to technical support from AT&T AlienVault USM. We go through our third-party provider. They are the ones who we reach out for technical support. We only reach out to the MSP.

I did not use another solution prior to AT&T AlienVault USM.

The initial setup of AT&T AlienVault USM was straightforward. The deployment took approximately one hour.

We did the implementation in-house with the help of a consultant. We require one person for the maintenance and support.

I have seen a return on investment using AT&T AlienVault USM.

I rate the return on investment of AT&T AlienVault USM a four out of five.

I rate the price of AT&T AlienVault USM a four out of five.

We evaluated Microsoft Sentinel and IBM QRadar before choosing AT&T AlienVault USM.

AT&T AlienVault USM is very easy to deploy, user-friendly, easy to understand, and fits very well for small, and medium-sized businesses. I won't say it is a con for the other ones, but they are more suitable for larger-sized companies and sometimes it is cost a lot for Microsoft Sentinel and IBM QRadar.

My advice to others is you need a dedicated person to monitor the same solution. If not, you have to outsource it to a 24/7 SOC, or Security Operation Center, such as a managed security provider.

I rate AT&T AlienVault USM a nine out of ten.

We use it for log management, which is connected to our active directory and other servers. It is agent-based and picklocks for our firewall. Every activity on the firewall is recorded, and notifications are sent with this solution.

It gives us everything we want. We don't use vulnerability management, and we use it specifically for the log.

We like the on-premises solution, but AT&T wants us to move to their cloud version. We are not interested in doing that because the storage in the cloud version is not cheap. We don't want to move to the cloud and be unable to afford the cost of maintaining the cloud. We are looking for a solution that we can afford long term. Since the support for on-premises is close to being eliminated, we are looking for a solution that fits our budget.

We have been using this solution for six years and are using the latest version of their on-premises USM.

We have had some issues, but we have been able to handle them.

We have tried to scale it with a partner, but one of the limitations is that we do not want to scale it if the on-premises is coming to the end of life. We have to manage our budget to ensure the business does not fail. In terms of assets, we have about 100 assets, and it is not difficult to maintain.

The partner that we liaised with during deployment manages any issues. We raise a ticket, push it to them, and work together on Zoom to fix it. Sometimes I handle the issues myself, but if I can't handle it, I push it to the partners. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

The setup was not difficult and was a bit straightforward. The tricky part was trying to correlate what to send alerts for. Sometimes the log is unclear, and the report is a bit ambiguous. So we need to do additional research to know what the log and raw data are saying. The deployment was done both in-house and with a third party.

The licensing cost is around 4 million naira. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten, with ten being the most reasonable.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. Regarding advice, before you implement any solution, ensure it meets your technical needs and assess whether you can maintain the solution in terms of cost of support. Regarding additional features, the existing features are good, but if they could integrate file integrity monitoring, it would be great.

AlienVault USM is an SaaS solution offered through the cloud. It's a security incident event management solution that scans logs to look for various security patterns that are shipped to it. Then it alerts us so we can identify trends.

AlienVault gives us greater visibility into our security and tells us what we need to address. We haven't had any breaches, but if we were to have some, we would get alerts.

AlienVault's reporting is good. I like that vulnerability assessment is part of the solution, and the UI is intuitive. Also, the overhead is low, which is to say we don't need a dedicated SOC team to manage and analyze things constantly. We're a small company that doesn't have those resources.

I think plugin management should be self-service on AlienVault USM. The other product is self-service but on the USM side. You have to submit a ticket then AT&T creates and updates the plugins.

We often have application logs that are unique to us, so it's silly to have to open a ticket, have them do the work, and then release the plugin. It would be nice if they had a self-service portal where we could define the parameters within the product for the plugin and have a custom plugin for our logs. 

I've been using AlienVault USM for about two or three years.

AlienVault USM has been quite stable so far. We might've had one or two hiccups over the past couple of years, but nothing major.

We have had no issues with scalability at all. It's been seamless. We have only three or four users on our DevOps team, but we're getting information from all over. Of course, many downstream people benefit from the work that we do, but only about four people actually log in and use it. 

Technical support has been okay. It hasn't been great. On a scale of one to 10 scale, I'd say maybe a six. It took them a long time to respond to some of our questions, and we didn't get the complete responses we were expecting. In some cases, the process took so long that the question's urgency diminished by the time we could get to an answer.

Setting up AlienVault USM was relatively straightforward. Of course, all software is complex, but this wasn't overly complex. We did do some professional service hours with the vendor during the deployment, but that was more about best practices. We asked how to configure it to get the most out of the solution. 

It's not an admin-heavy product in terms of maintenance and management. There's certainly a lot you can do to customize and configure it, but it doesn't require much administration. Someone is logging in most days to check in and review alerts.

We looked at Splunk Enterprise with the added security module, and that worked great, but it also had a lot of overhead to get value out of it. We just didn't have the capacity for it.

I would give AlienVault USM a solid eight out of 10. There are certainly products out there that can do more. For a smaller company, I'd say it's a solid nine or a 10, but if we compare all the offerings on the market, I would say it's a solid eight. It doesn't have some of the features of the other ones, but it offers a lot of benefits to us because we can get the value that we need out of it without having a dedicated team.

It's been good overall, so I would give it a thumbs up. It's suitable for small organizations that don't have the capacity for a dedicated SOC that could handle something like Splunk Enterprise. Splunk is great for businesses with a dedicated team to do full-time analysis. But I think this is a nice solution for smaller companies where the IT staff has to wear multiple hats.

General use cases would be for patch management and vulnerability management. The devices that are on the network may need patching if they're outdated. For any device or node that has entered the network and may be considered a threat, the HTTPS ports and different nodes need to be monitored for incoming and outgoing traffic. We could put in security rules for monitoring the actual devices down to the USP level, and we can also get the vulnerability information from OSX, and then provide that information to the IT teams.

In terms of the version, usually, when the updates come, the updates need to be aggregated to the customer, but at this moment in time, I am yet to secure a customer in that space due to the current COVID crisis in the country, across the Pacific, and globally.

In terms of deployment, the endpoints are on-premise, but it would be cloud-based in terms of the platform. So, it could be both depending on the customer. They would either have cloud or hybrid.

In terms of monitoring, my best feature would be the monitoring of components across the network. It monitors the respective nodes and any new node that comes onto the network and provides reports. The reporting dashboards are really helpful for management in terms of making decisions around patch management.

It is an all-in-one package. In terms of the selling points, to the best of my knowledge, it has eight different selling points or eight features, and they're all interlinked, which most of the infrastructure setups here do not have. They have separate systems for monitoring the networks. So, USM can cater based on those eight capabilities.

I've been using it just for my own personal upskilling in terms of how the product works. At the moment, it is pretty straightforward and simple, and it is working how it is supposed to. The feedback would come once it is deployed to customer sites. They'll be using it on a more frequent basis, and that's when the feedback would come in terms of the areas in which they're facing issues or are looking for simplicity.

I have been using this solution for the last eight to 10 months.

So far, I haven't seen any patches or updates from the partner or the OTX site to show any issues in terms of stability. Based on the frequency of the updates, at the moment, it seems stable.

It is easy to scale. It comes with all features, as opposed to separate individual modules. To my knowledge, you can scale it for your organization as and when there is a requirement or the organization grows. So, in terms of scalability, there is no problem. After you get it up and running, as the organization grows, the engines will be able to pick up that information.

It is really good for medium and large companies, but it can also be used for small organizations. Instead of deploying it to a small organization, you could provide a service where it is not on the customer site, and you basically link into your nodes for small customers. So, you install it for medium and large customers, and for small customers, you install it on your premise, and then you sell the individual features that they may request.

I have not been in touch with their technical support. I deal with the technical account manager. When I read up the information and there is something that I'm not sure about, I check my resources and see what's available online. If none of the available resources are helpful, I reach out to my account manager who then puts me in touch with the technical team. I presume that if we encounter any issues in deployment, it would be based on a customer's demography or the setup.

If you're not familiar with it from a tech perspective, it might be confusing for you, but from what I've seen and based on my experience, it is pretty simple and straightforward.

The user guides are also very helpful if you hit any roadblocks. It is very straightforward in terms of the instructions to set it up, but you should have minimum tech experience in understanding the documentation, which is fair enough and good because you don't want it to be too simple to set up that companies would say, "Well, we don't need IT if anybody can do this." So, you'd need some technical background to at least understand the documentation or the user guide.

I've only installed it for myself. It took a short amount of time to get it up and running. The deployment duration would depend on a customer's infrastructure size and the number of nodes that a customer has. It will also depend on the data collection that the agents or the engines need to do to protect the information and then put it in its database.

Its price is in the medium to upper range.

I would definitely recommend this solution, but I would also do a pre-assessment of the organizational setup and infrastructure. I'm a reseller, and it is obviously my top priority that we sell the product

If you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrants, you will see AlienVault is up there in the upper right quadrant, which makes it one of the top recommended solutions. That is the reason for my partnership with AT&T Cybersecurity for the product.

I would rate AT&T AlienVault USM a nine out of 10. No solution is 100% perfect.

We use it for compliance. We're not using it as a security operation center type of thing. Its usage is more from an auditing standpoint at this point.

We partner with them for customers who need something like a SIEM, so we're a cloud provider and integrator.

It is deployed on the cloud. It is a combination of AT&T's own cloud and our cloud. We run our own infrastructure. So, it is a hybrid and private cloud.

We're using it more for reporting, that's all. We're using it to help our customers to pass any kind of audits that they receive.

I don't have any suggestions for improvement. On our side, as a provider, we should develop a real security operation center type of practice, which we don't have right now.

There could be some type of integration with our existing portal. We have our own customer portals, and it would be good if there was an integration so that our portal can provide reports. There could be some type of API into the AlienVault system with the USM system so that it is easy to show the customers high-level reports of the system through our portal.

It is pretty stable from what I hear. 

It is cloud-based, so it is very scalable. It really depends on how many devices they have in their environment. Our customers are more mid-sized companies, so it fits what we need.

We don't have a lot of clients using this SIEM. Usually, a client is interested in something like this to help them with their auditing. So, we don't have a lot of customers using it right now. Probably in the near future, its usage will be increased in terms of the customers requesting it from a security standpoint.

It is pretty good. I usually don't contact their support. I usually contact their sales team. I work with their pre-sales and sales engineer and account rep.

It is pretty straightforward from what I've seen, but it has to be verified to make sure any changes in the environment are added to the configuration. Like anything, it is not set it and forget it. You really have to make sure that it is capturing everything if things change or new systems are brought online. It is more of a procedural thing where you have to make sure somebody is keeping it up to date.

For its maintenance, we have someone who manages the product itself. In our company, for IT people, we have around 100 or so staff. We have customers nationwide, but we probably have two to three people managing this product. They are in more of a security analyst type of role dedicated to security.

I don't know exactly, but I know it is based on the number of logs and the retention duration, such as 30 days or something like that. So, the smallest package is about 500 a month for 30 days of logs.

There is a virtual machine. You need resources for it. It is a log collecting VM. They provide the software, and you just have to load a virtual machine. So, you're going to incur some CPU RAM and storage for wherever this log collecting appliance is running, which typically is in our cloud and on our platform for the customer.

I would advise knowing your requirements and your data. What are you trying to protect or monitor? Before implementing something like this, you really should have basic security in place. You should have systems that are generating logs, for example, antivirus software and firewall. You have to have that all in place first to make this kind of product useful because this type of product is really meant to aggregate things after the fact. After you've put all the systems in place, then this system aggregates and collects everything together. You really need all the endpoint security, firewall security, and server security first, so you have meaningful data to look at. The SIEM is not going to be useful if you don't have any meaningful data for it to collect.

I still need to dig into it deeper to see exactly what it does. Our practice is kind of evolving, so this is probably something that we need to offer more to customers. We need to get more product knowledge on it and develop a practice around it. A lot of customers are asking for security operations center (SOC) services for remediation of problems. We don't do that right now, but that's something that I know is probably on the roadmap. With everything going on, that would be a helpful service to our customers, and I think they're asking for that. We've encountered customers asking for that type of service. We don't do it yet. I know there are other partners out there that do that, so really it's on our side to develop the product more. Whether it involves staying with this AT&T product or going for maybe another one, customers are looking for a little bit more. They are not just to have it set up, but also to have someone to act on any kind of alerts or any kind of potential breaches. They're looking for a service for somebody to actually remediate.

From what I know of the product, I would rate it an eight out of 10. 

We were trying to get into the security market to be able to offer something to our clients who are asking for a monitoring event management system. We started looking at what we could offer as an MSP to our clients; that's what drove us into evaluating different SIEM products, to get a better understanding of how the billing is set up as a partner. Alien Vault had the best set up for MSPs — the way they are set up for billing and the way they set up their USM account. 

The reason why we went with AT&T AlienVault USM, was because we liked their reporting capability a little better than some of the other ones we evaluated; however, the biggest draw for us was how AT&T has their MSP program set up. In most cases, you have to buy a certain number of either agents or sensors which are, more or less, the program. With an MSP, our clients don't have to buy any — there are no minimum requirements. Alien Vault provided us with really good worksheets to detail the number of sensors needed when we are in negotiations with prospective clients. We can also use them to determine the number of devices that are going to be monitored, and how we can tailor the customer setup based on what the customer requirement is.

The other big selling feature for us was its integration capabilities with all the other security-based products, not just security-based, but application settings in general. It works with Google Drive, Gmail, and Microsoft 365. It also works with different antivirus software from Proof Point to Okta — all of the different pieces of applications that we normally provide as a best practice to our clients. This software can interact with them all and pull the event data and the security data from all of these different applications, and more.

I'd like to see a dashboard that's a little more descriptive. We can customize the dashboards, but the out-of-the-box dashboards are kind of bland. Since we give our customers access to their dashboards, it would be nice if they were a little bit more intuitive. We can go easily drill into it and show them everything, but the customer just sees the writing on the page. 

I'd like to see them dress up their out-of-the-box dashboard a little bit. We have the ability to do a lot of that. 

Since they have this image — they have a strong MSP program. I would love to see them allow branding, which they don't at this point.

We deployed the demo roughly eight months ago.

AT&T AlienVault USMIt's has been very stable.

Their support has been stellar, any issues that we had with trying to get it configured or trying to interpret instructions, we could just make a quick phone call and they were there to help us.

I'd say it was kind of in the middle, complexity-wise. It's actually fairly easy to deploy a new client. 

It's competitive with other similar solutions; however, I don't do the billing so I can't properly comment on it.

Most of our clients are small to medium-sized businesses; they can't afford to go out and purchase a SIEM on their own. They're looking for us to provide something for them. This was why we provide HCZ cybersecurity and Alien Vault, etc. 

If you're in an MSP and you're servicing small to medium-sized clients, this is definitely a product that you want to look at and evaluate. When we were doing our evaluations, we were looking at the applications that are supported out-of-the-box, without having to develop any special ATIs — we wanted a pre-built application that supported most of the applications that we use within our client base.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

I'd like to see a little bit more work, out-of-the-box, regarding the dashboards. I'd like to see them provide us with branding capabilities, to be able to put our logos on the dashboard so that the client understands that it's coming from Ice Consulting instead of Alien Vault.

We primarily use the solution for cybersecurity events and management.

The SIEM, security information management is very, very good. Basically, it's great at analyzing the logs of our servers.

The setup is very easy and straightforward.

The solution is a bit complicated. It could be simplified quite a bit.

The correlation engine could be improved. Much improvement could be made there, as it is an important open-source solution. 

The solution could benefit from including security orchestration. It's still not available yet. It would be really nice to have in a future release.

It could use something like a pen test. Tools like that would make it more comprehensive from a cybersecurity aspect. 

I've been using the solution since about 2015. It's been approximately six years or so.

The solution is extremely stable. We don't have any issues with its reliability. It doesn't crash or freeze and it's not buggy at all.

The solution doesn't scale well if you are talking about enterprises using it. However, for our purposes, we've never had an issue with this. Larger companies might. We do intend to continue to use the solution and potentially increase usage.

Technical support is extremely reliable. We've very satisfied with the level of service we receive. They are always knowledgeable, helpful, and responsive.

The initials setup is not complex. It's a very straightforward implementation.

The overall deployment is quite quick. It might take about 30 minutes or so. That's all.

The solution has a subscription-based annual payment option. It's not a perpetual license.

We use both on-premises and cloud deployment models.

We both use the solution and sell the solution as well.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would rate the solution at an eight.

We're more focused on servicing medium to small businesses. This solution may not be suitable for a large enterprise-level organization.

That said, we highly recommend it. I'd recommend that new users decide to first go for the trial. Take the trial and then make sure that you like it before investing in the subscription. The company offers a free trial - you might as well use it.