Vectra AI Reviews

We have two use cases. The first is that Vectra's platform allows us to get visibility into anomalous behavior, which, previously, we never really had access to, for threat hunting and incident response. We use it in support of our incident response operations to help supplement our investigations on hosts. We use it to correlate any suspicious activities, which is something that Vectra has been extremely accurate in, when used the right way. 

The second use case is that we've used the Vectra Cognito Recall and Cognito Stream devices. With these integrations, it's given us instant visibility into all the network data as well. That enables us to conduct our own hunts on our network data, data you'd see on a security information and event management (SIEM) solution. It also gives us the ability to correlate with our playbooks because it gives us access to the data itself in much more depth and detail.

The solution captures network metadata at scale and enriches it with security information. We store metadata for three months. Just to be able to scale the amount of information that we collect on the networks is a problem in itself. We have our SIEM solution that collects all of these logs. Making sure these logs are still sending, that these devices are still sending to our main SIEM, are issues. For Vectra AI, even with three months of retention, with the environment we have, we have never had issues accessing this network data. On top of that, if there are any issues, the support team is amazing in providing feedback and fixing them.

It has actually increased our security analyst workload, but in a good way. It has reduced the amount of stuff that we used to look at, and has allowed us to re-approach our C-CERT from signature-based detections to more behavioral-based detections. It has reduced the amount of boring work and work that is on the host, to more thought-provoking work based on behavioral data. We're now able to approach our C-CERT from a risk perspective and a numbers perspective.

It has reduced that boring work drastically and it reduces the time to investigate incidents in general. While it has definitely added a bunch of incidents for us to look at, it has reduced the workload of how we work those incidents. It makes them not only much easier to engage with and easier to visualize, but also enables us, as analysts, to work in a much more efficient and simple way.

Vectra has also helped move work from our Tier 2 to our Tier 1 analysts. Eighty percent of our Tier 1 analysts are doing Tier 2 work.

Finally, the solution has reduced the time it takes us to respond to attacks. It has gone from on the order of hours to less than 10 minutes to 30 minutes.

The most valuable features are Cognito Recall and Cognito Detect.

I didn't think Vectra AI actually provided this functionality, but essentially 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, as that is a whole undertaking in itself. It has expedited all our investigations and hunting activities because it's all there and available, and they manage it.

We use their Privileged Account Analytics for detecting issues with privileged accounts. Given that we're a global company with over 35,000 machines, the machine learning-type of analysis or visibility into baselining behavior in privileged accounts in the environment is something Vectra does amazingly. It's amazing the visibility that I get. Not only is it providing a baseline to understand the behaviors of how IT, for example, is acting globally and in all these different regions, but it also gives me an ability to get much more granular and understand more of the high-risk behaviors, rather than the behaviors that we expect from IT. Usually, malware attackers and normal IT activities look the same. It's about discerning what's outside of baseline, and Vectra does this amazingly, incorporating not only the account privileges but the context of what these accounts are doing on hosts, on top of that.

The solution also provides visibility into behaviors across the full life cycle of an attack, visibility into the attacker kill-chain. I personally do red-team testing and threat hunting and, in addition to the detections which Vectra has already caught, it's been able to outline a full attack from an external red team that came in and tested with us. Not only did it show exactly what they did, but it was even able to provide a profile of the type of behavior that this exhibited, which was an external actor. In my own attacks that I've conducted on the network, it's been able to detect everything and properly align it in a kill-chain fashion. That is extremely helpful in investigations because it helps align the host data a little bit when you have visibility of the network in such a way.

Vectra also triages threats and correlates them with compromised host devices.

Some of the customization could be improved. Everything is provided for you as an easy solution to use, but working with it and doing specific development could be worked on a bit more in the scope of an incident response team. In my opinion, it's built as a solution for everything, instead of it being part of a bunch of other tools.

For example, we have a source solution which will orchestrate the ability for us to use a host EDR and the ability for us to use Vectra. We see Vectra from a purely network standpoint. Therefore, we don't want it to be the incident manager where we have to fill in specific things to be fixed. We think the integration with source solutions could be better. It tries to treat itself as an incident resolution platform.

I have been using Vectra AI for three to four years.

It has never crashed. It's always working. And they always resolve any issue before you can act. They'll alert you of an issue and then they'll report that it's fixed. They're very proactive.

In terms of instant access to the data and scalability, we've never seen issues with the platform at all. We use it everywhere, across all our regions across over 35,000 devices. We have plans to increase usage of the solution and the capacity.

We have less than 10 people working with the solution and they're all C-CERT incident responders and investigators. And we have one person, a C-CERT specialist, for maintenance of the solution but he is barely doing that anymore because they have a support team that helps alert us to any issues.

I've found that Vectra in general, away from the platform, has been extremely helpful and given me any support that I need on investigations or in trying to reduce the amount of noise. They have allowed me to do this, but it requires a lot of work upfront.

Looking back at the setup now, it was straightforward because of the support that they provided. I'm not sure how long the overall deployment took but it may have taken a couple of months.

We had to install specific brains in multiple regions. We were given instructions on where to install specific network nodes and sensors to be able to collect information where the brains were located. All of this configuration was provided directly from them. They sent the devices over to our data centers along with documentation to support the devices.

We have definitely seen return on our investment (ROI). While our analysts are working on "more" incidents, the efficiency of the way they're working, due to the way that Vectra has broken down its platform and its data, has exponentially decreased the response times to incidents. It has also trained them indirectly because with the story-lining, the way that it creates these detections, analysts receive them and pick them up much quicker than they would in a normal security class.

We evaluated other options. I wasn't the person who decided on Vectra AI at the time, but we were looking at Darktrace and other machine learning-type solutions.

Vectra fit the niche of what we needed, from the perspective of the former C-CERT manager. Also the feedback we got from their team and the support we've had with them really pushed us to work with them. They were very collaborative and we believed in what they were doing when they initially started working with us all those years ago.

My advice would be to really utilize the support and collaborate with Vectra. The solution requires heavy usage and customization to your environment. They provide the guidelines and you just have to be able to fill in the specifics. If you don't do that, it's not an effective tool. It is a really hands-on tool.

Vectra has done a really good job of giving you visibility into the type of behavior into which you want visibility. But reducing the number of alerts really depends more on the analyst who is operating it and working with it.

As for its ability to reduce false positives and help us focus on the highest-risk threats, the term "false positive," especially in this scope of machine learning, doesn't seem to me to apply. Vectra gives you visibility into what you want to see. It gives us visibility into the exact behaviors which we sometimes have issues trying to create detections for on the host. And on the network it's collected and brought it all together. We get really good visibility into all of the risky behaviors. Vectra provides the whole context, on the network, of what it sees in terms of a risky behavior and provides a story with it.

In comparison to some of the other tools that I've come across in this category, I would definitely give it a 10 out of 10.

Our main intention was to see what type of visibility, in terms of detections, Vectra could give us. 

We use it on both our manufacturing perimeter and at the internet perimeter. That's where we have placed the devices. We have placed it across four sites, two in UAE and two outside UAE.

What we have seen over the course of the three to four months it has been in place is that it has not found anything bad. That's good news because nothing specific has happened. But we have identified a lot of misconfigurations as well as some information on how applications are working, which was not known earlier. The misconfigurations that became known because of Vectra have been corrected.

It has given us the opportunity to understand some of the applications better than we had understood them before because some of the detections required triage and, while triaging, or in that investigation, we found how applications work. That is one of the main benefits.

We did a red team penetration exercise and almost all the pen activities were picked up by Vectra. That is another big benefit that we have seen through the deployment of the device.

Apart from the network traffic, a lot of the privileged accounts get monitored. It focuses on the service, the machine, and the account. We have seen many of the privileged accounts flagged with alerts whenever they're doing any activity which they do not normally do. We can see that it is the admin accounts or our support team accounts where the activity is happening. It is important because any privileged access which sees increased activity becomes a cause for suspicion. It's something that we need to be watchful for. It's a very useful feature because a privileged account can propagate more easily than an account that is not privileged.

These are all examples of the kind of information which is of great value, information that we didn't have earlier.

The detections, as well as the host ratings, allow us to focus in cases where we are pressured for time and need to do something immediately. We can focus on the critical and high hosts, or on the detections that have a very high score. If you do a good job in the rules and policy configuration, the alerts are not too numerous. A person can easily focus on all the alerts. But as of now we focus on the critical, high, and medium. The scoring and the correlation really help in focusing the security operations.

While I wouldn't say Vectra AI has reduced our security analyst's workload, it allows him to focus. It's a new tool and it's an additional tool. It's not like we implemented this tool and removed another one. It doesn't necessarily reduce his total time, but what it definitely does is it allows him to prioritize more quickly. Previously, he would be looking at all the other tools that we have. Here, it allows him to focus so things of serious concern can be targeted much faster and earlier. The existing tools remain. But Vectra is something to help give more visibility and focus. In that sense, it saves his time. Vectra is very good for automated threat-hunting, so you get to pick out things faster. All the other tools give you a volume of data and you have to do the threat-hunting manually.

Also, the technical expertise required to do the hunting part is much less now, because the tool does it for you. I wouldn't say that it has moved work from tier 2 to tier 1, but both of them can use their time and efforts for resolving problems rather than searching for actual threats. You cannot do away with tier 2 people, but they can have a more focused approach, and the tier 1 people can do less. It reduces the work involved in all their jobs.

In addition, it has definitely increased our security efficiency. The red team exercise is a very clear-cut example of how efficiency has been enhanced, because none of the other tools picked these things up. Vectra was the only tool that did.

It makes our workforce more efficient, and makes them target the actual threats, and prioritizes their efforts and attention. Whether that eventually leads to needing fewer people is a different question. Quantifying it into a manpower piece is probably more an HR issue. But improved efficiency is definitely what it provides. If I needed three or four tier 2 people before, I can manage with one or two now.

And Vectra has definitely reduced the time it takes us to respond to attacks. It's a significant reduction in time. In some cases, the key aspect is that, more than saving time, it detects things which other tools don't. It helps us find things before they actually cause damage. The other tools are more reactive. If your IPS and your signatures are getting hit, then you're already targeted. What Vectra achieves is that it alerts us at the initial phase, during the pre-damage phase. During the red team exercise we had, it alerted us at their initial recon phase, before they actually did anything. So more than saving time, it helps prevent an attack.

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. With the triaging, things are improving more and more because, once we identify and investigate and determine that something is normal, or that it is a misconfiguration and we correct it, in either of these two instances, gradually the number of alerts is dropping. Recently, some new features have been introduced in the newer versions, like the Kerberos ticketing feature. That, obviously, has led to an initial spike in the number of tickets because that feature was not there. It was introduced less than a month back. Otherwise, the tickets have been decreasing, and almost all the tickets that it generates need investigation. It has very rarely been the situation that a ticket has been raised and we found that it was not unique information.

Also, we have seen a lot of detections that are not related to the network. Where we have gained extra value in terms of the internet is during data exfiltration and suspicious domains access.

The detections focus on the host, and the host's score is dependent on how many detections it triggers. We have seen with many of our probing tools, without triaging, that these hosts pretty quickly come into the high-threat quadrant. Its intelligence comes from identifying vulnerable hosts along with the triaging part. That's something that we have seen.

One thing which I have found where there could be improvement is with regard to the architecture, a little bit: how the brains and sensors function. It needs more flexibility with regard to the brain. If there were some flexibility in that regard, that would be helpful, because changing the mode of the brain is complex. In some cases, the change is permanent. You cannot revert it. I would like to see greater flexibility in doing HA without having to buy more boxes just to do it.

Another area they could, perhaps, look at is with OT (operational technology) specifically. Vectra is very specific to IT-related threats. It really doesn't have OT in its focus. We are using another tool for that, but maybe that is another area they can consider venturing into.

It's being used by my team of four or five people. Once we hand it over to operations, then the team size will increase significantly. It will grow to about 10 to 15 people.

We have been using Vectra AI four about four months.

Stability-wise, we've not had any issues, although it has only been three or four months. We had some slight bugs in there, bugs that were related to the triaging and how we used the conditions. But stability-wise, we've had no problem. 

There were some software issues, bugs, but then nothing major. There were minor cosmetic and syntax-based issues while raising the conditions. Apart from that, no issues with the stability.

Currently we are in the process of expanding it to two more remote sites. One is in West Africa, in Guinea, and another one in the U.S. Those are more recent deployments, in place less than a month. We are in the process of creating the policies, and triaging, and investigations for those. That's ongoing. With those sites, the benefit realization is still pending because we just started the traffic loading.

The scalability part is where the architecture comes in. That's one of the areas for improvement that I would like to recommend. Unless you have dedicated brains doing anything other than brain functions, it doesn't become scalable. If you have a brain in mixed mode, your scalability is limited. Also, the brain's capacity gets reduced based on its function, so if it's in mixed mode, the capacity is less. If it's in brain mode, the capacity is more. If it's in sensor mode, the capacity is different. It makes scalability difficult. Unless you go for two big brains with your highest capacity device and then you keep adding.

When I spoke to our internal success team at Vectra, they mentioned that this is something that they're planning to fix in the near future with an upgrade.

Whenever we have raised issues we have gotten timely responses. Getting support is fairly easy compared to some of the other technologies that we have. A simple email is sufficient to get attention from their support team. They have a remote access feature wherein we don't necessarily have to give a WebEx. We just simply enable the remote access on the device, and the remote team can log in, and have a look, and understand what the problem is.

The problem was the architecture. Once we arrived at an architecture, it was simple. What takes time is to build the architecture plan because of the way the brains work. We had to agree on a design. Once you agree on the architecture, the implementation is pretty straightforward.

The initial architecture design took some time, a week or so. The implementation was done within a day.

Our implementation strategy was to have an HA setup for each site. We put two brains into mixed mode, but then we found out that if we put it in mixed mode, HA is not possible. So we set it up as a standby and we configured manual scripts to transfer the file from one brain to the other brain. That's how we are managing it now. If we want to go live on the standby brain, we just import the configuration and go live, if there is a failure.

It's a little bit manual process for us. If it has to be automated, I believe the brains cannot be in mixed mode. That was where we faced the initial problem, I mean, for the architecture part. So we have two brains configured in mixed mode and we have a couple of sensors on the OT side, sensors that are talking to these brains. The sensors are there in the OT connectivity, the active or standby firewalls, and this is repeated on the other site as well.

Two or three people are enough for the deployment. They should have a sound understanding of the network and an idea of how the architecture and the applications function. One person from the architecture team and one person from the network or security team are sufficient to understand how to get maximum utilization from Vectra.

In terms of visibility and security improvement, we have definitely seen a return on our investment.

We have a one-year subscription that covers support and everything. There is no other overhead.

We evaluated Darktrace, in addition to Vectra, each in a PoC. We chose Vectra because the things that Vectra picked up were far more useful, and necessary from an enterprise point of view. Darktrace was a bit noisier.

One thing we have learned using Vectra is that anomaly detection is a critical component of security; a non-signature-based technology is very critical. It helps pick up things that other tools, which are more focused on active threats, will miss. That is one major lesson that we have picked up from Vectra.

My advice would be that you need to focus, because the licensing is based heavily on IPs and area of coverage, although predominantly IPs. You need to have a very clear idea of what areas you want to cover, and plan according to that. Full coverage, sometimes, may not be practical because, since it's a detection tool, covering everything for large organizations is complicated. Focus on critical areas first, and then expand later on.

Also, the architecture part needs to be discussed and finalized early on, because there is a limited flexibility, depending on which model you choose to take.

The solution captures network metadata at scale and enriches it with security information, but the full realization of that will come with Cognito Stream, which we have yet to implement. Right now we are on Cognito Detect. Cognito Stream is something that we are working on implementing, hopefully within the next month or so. Once that comes online, the enriched metadata will have greater value. As of now, the value is there and it's inside Vectra, but we don't see that information — such as Kerberos tokens, or certificates, or what the encryption is — unless it leads to a detection. Only in that event do we currently see that information.

The Cognito Stream can feed into our SIEM and then we will have rich information about all the metadata which Vectra has in our data lake.

We use Vectra with the assumption that our other defensive controls are not working. We rely on it to be able to detect anomalous activities on our network and trigger investigation activities. It's a line of detection assuming that a breach occurred or has been successful in some way. That's our primary use case.

We have it in some of other use cases, like anomalous network activity and detection for things. E.g., we are trying to refine or improve suspicious internal behaviours because we are a development technology company. We have developers doing suspicious things all the time. Therefore, we use it to help us identify when they are not behaving correctly and improve our best practices.

We have it predominantly on-prem, which is a combination of physical and virtual sensors. We also have a very minor element on the cloud where we are trialing a couple of components that are not fully deployed. For the cloud deployment, we are using Azure.

We are on the latest version of Cognito.

We have a limited use of Vectra Privileged Account Analytics for detecting issues with privileged accounts at the moment. That is primarily due to the fact that our identity management solution is going through a process of improving our privileged account management process, so we are getting a lot of false positives in that area. Once our privilege account management infrastructure is fully in place and live, then we will be taking on more privileged account detections and live SOC detections to investigate. However, at the moment, it has limited applicability.

We have a lot of technically capable people with privilege who are able to do things they should or should not be able to do, as they're not subject-matter experts when it comes to things like security. They may make a decision to implement or download a piece of software, implement a script, or do something that gets the job done for them. However, this opens us up to major security risk. These are the types of activities that the tool has been able to identify, enabling us to improve communication with those individuals or teams so they improve their business process to a more secure or best practice approach. This is a good example of how the solution has enabled us to identify when people are engaging in legitimate risky activities, and we're able to identify and engage with them to reduce risk within the network.

It has enabled our security analysts to have more time to look at other tools. We have many tools in place, and Vectra is just one of them. Their priority will always be to deal with intrusion attempt type of alerts, such as malware compromise or misuse of credentials. Vectra was able to simplify the process of starting a threat hunting or investigation activity on an anomaly. Previously, we weren't able to do this because the amount of alerts and volume of data were just too large. Within our security operations, they can now review large volumes of data that provide us with indicators of compromise or anomalous behaviour. 

By reducing false positives, we are able to take on more procedures and processes. We have about seven different tools providing alerts and reporting to the SOC at any one time. These range from network-based to host-based to internet-based alerts and detections. We are more capable to cover the whole spectrum of our tooling. Previously, we were only able to deal with a smaller subset due to the sheer workload. 

In some regards, I find that Vectra probably create more investigative questions. E.g., we need to find answers from other solutions. So, it is raising more questions than it is specifically answering. However, without Vectra, we wouldn't know the questions to ask in the first place. We wouldn't know what anomalies were occurring on our network.

Vectra data provides us with an element of enrichment for other detections. For example, if we see a detection going onto a single host, we could then look at that activity in Vectra to see whether there are suspicious detections occurring. This would give us the high percentage of confidence that the compromise was more severe than a normal malware alert, e.g., destructive malware or commander control malware enabling someone to pivot horizontally across the network. Vectra provides us with that insight. This enables us to build up an enriched view quickly.

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.

It aggregates information on a host and host basis so you can look at individual detections and how they are occurring over time. Then, you can have a look at the host scores too. One of the useful elements of that is it is able to aggregate scores together to give you a realistic view of the current risk that the host plays in your network. It also ages out detections over time. Then, if that host is not been seeing doing anything else that fits into suspicious detection, it will reduce its risk score and fall off of the quadrant where you are monitoring critical content for hosts that you're trying to detect. 

When you are analyzing and triaging detections and looking for detection patterns, you are able to create filters and triage detections out. Then, in the future, those types of business usual or expected network behaviours don't create false positive triggers which would then impact risk scores. 

Without the detection activities that come from Vectra, we wouldn't have been able to identify the true cause of an event's severity by relying on other tools. This would have slipped under the radar or taken a dedicated analyst days to look for it. Whereas, Vectra can aggregate the risk of multiple detections, and we are able to identify and find them within a couple of hours. 

You are always limited with visibility on the host due to the fact that it is a network based tool. It gives you visibility on certain elements of the attack path, but it doesn't necessarily give you visibility on everything. Specifically, the initial intrusion side of things that doesn't necessarily see the initial compromise. It doesn't see stuff that goes on the host, such as where scripts are run. Even though you are seeing traffic, it doesn't necessarily see the malicious payload. Therefore, it's very difficult for it to identify these type of host-driven complex attacks.

It only shows us a view of suspicious behaviours. It doesn't show us a view of key or regularly attacked company targets. This could be because we don't have one of the other tools or products that Vectra provides, such as Stream or Recall. 

My challenge with the detection alerting platform, Cognito, is it tells us this host is behaving suspiciously and is targeting these other machines, but it won't give you a view when a host is the target of multiple attacks. This because you may have a key assets, such as domain controllers or configuration management servers. These are key assets which may get targeted. If you're a savvy attacker, you spread out your attack across multiple sources to try and hide them across the network. That is where the solution falls a bit short. It is trying to build that chain of relationships across detections and also trying to show detections from a perspective of a victim rather than the perspective of an attacker. I have expressed these concerns to Vectra and they are currently in as feature requests.

There is another feature in place which takes additional data feeds, such as DHCP IP allocation data. Their inputs are taken from Windows event logs, and that's the format they have in place. They use that to provide them with a more accurate view of host identities. If you are only relying on IP addresses, and IP addresses change over time, it's sometimes very difficult to show a consistent view of a system behaviour over time, as the IP can change per month. Unfortunately, because their DHCP data is taken from Windows host events and our DHCP data is taken from a Palo Alto system that generates the IP leasing, the formats are incompatible. I think taking different formats for that type of data is something else we have a feature request in for. At the moment, we don't have an accurate view, or confidence, that they are resolving when an IP address changes from host to host. So, we may be missing an accurate view of risk on some of those hosts. 

We also have the same problem with VPN and Citrix. E.g., if you're on the network and on IP address A, then you come in via the VPN, you're now on IP address B. Thus, if you're spreading your suspicious behaviour across both the internal network and VPN, then across Citrix, we don't get to join all that information up. They are seen as three different systems, so it causes a bit of a problem trying to correlate that type of event data.

If you include the proof of concept, I have been using Vectra for three years.

There are no concerns regarding the stability. It seems to be very reliable. I've had one sensor in two and a half years become corrupt and need to be rebuilt. That's it.

Day-to-day maintenance takes half an FTE to one FTE a day. There is no maintenance really required on the platform. All we need to do is monitor for when a health alarm occurs (a sensor is not working), then we raise the relevant request with the teams to investigate. Maintaining the health of the platform requires a feed into our operations team to be able to look at our monitor to determine when the health is degrading. Doing general health, like detection filters, triage filters, reviewing, looking for patterns and anomalies, and creating new filters, needs a daily dedicated FTE.

The scalability is brilliant. It is able to cope with virtual sensors. You can increase the hardware that supports the image and it will work with the high bandwidth of the data going through. There are no concerns in terms of the scalability.

It does create capture network data at scale because we have it deployed at over a 100 geographically split sites. We have over 8000 users on cloud. So, it's able to deal with the network traffic very easily, providing us with additional information. If we were just relying on things like firewalls and packet capture applications, we wouldn't get to that enrichment of a security context put on top of normal network traffic. 

Mainly, there are five people dedicated to using the platform: Tier 2 security analysts and an operations director. However, that is widen out to whomever we are raising the support requirements to, like the Tier 3s. When raised, we also enable the shared link so they can go into the platform and look at the data associated with the detection on that host. So, there is a wider volume of people who use the solution to get information for specifically requested cases. 

The technical support is very good. They always respond within a short amount of time to provide expert information and have always been helpful in trying to work through problems to find a good solution.

Previously, we had a general sensor solution taking logs. We didn't have an equivalent detection platform for our network nor did we have a tool capable of providing us with competent intrusion detection capabilities post-breach. Our main SIEM logging platform was generating over a 1000 alerts a day. It was bloated and unusable when trying to identify events/anomalies that were occurring. Once we implemented Vectra, it was able to give us a refined view and tell us which things we need to prioritize so we were able to reduce our workload from a 1000 alerts a day down to 10.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward. It was pretty much plug and play.

The initial pilot deployment took weeks, but that was because the scope kept on changing. However, the initial deployment only took hours. 

It has not helped us move work from our Tier 2 to Tier 1 analysts, but this is a fault in our implementation. The structure of our organization hasn't necessarily changed. We don't have Tier 1 security analysts. Therefore, we don't have the capacity or capability for them to deal with these types of detections. We have to leave our Vectra detection and activities with our Tier 2s.

We now have an implementation strategy. We have virtualized sensors in most locations rather than physical sensors. We only have physical sensors in the areas where there is high bandwidth traffic, such as key internal data centers. The virtual centers for local offices are sufficient for the volume of traffic there. We only deploy in areas that are key risks. We also only deploy and monitor network zones which are of significant risk, so we don't monitor our guest WiFi subnet nor do we monitor our development network subnets. Therefore, we keep our segregated networks and zoning structure consistent so we are able to only monitor for priority areas.

Vectra had an engineer come down. They plugged the device in and set it up. Since the firewall rules were already in place, it was working.

Assuming the firewall rules are already in place for the physical sensor, it needs one person plugging it in and putting it into a rack. If it is a virtual sensor, then it is just somebody who can deploy the virtual image onto the virtual infrastructure and switch it on. It takes two dedicated people to deploy. If you have a network team and a server team, then you will need one of each of those skill sets to be able to deploy the tool. It all depends on how your organization is structured.

It has increased our security efficiency because we can now do more with the tool. E.g., if we had a data analyst who was creating models and searching the data to identify the same types of the numbers/behaviours within Vectra, we would need at least two or three FTEs.

Vectra has reduced the time it takes us to respond to attacks. In 2019, we conducted a red team activity. The Vectra appliance was able to alert the red team on activity within three hours of the test starting. Prior tests to that, in real life or red team scenarios, we were potentially looking at days. However, we also tightened controls prior to that testing period. While Vectra has done an amazing job in reducing the time to respond, there are so many other things that we also have put in place which have contributed towards it.

Vectra has saved us weeks, if not months, in terms of the ability to identify a breach. Our process has been reduced down to hours, which is a potentially massive return on investment, if we were compromised. From an insurance perspective, the return investment is fantastic. 

From an FTE perspective, while it reduces the number of events that we have to look up and the number of alerts, we now have very specific things where we need to ask questions. Therefore, it's creating more work which we weren't capable of doing. 

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. Three years later, the license is now due for renewal so we will need to review it and see how competitive it is versus other solutions.

When we implemented the physical sensors, there were costs for support in terms of detection review sessions. We had a monthly session where an analyst would talk through the content, types of detections that they were seeing, etc. 

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.

We did review the marketplace and look around. For example, we looked online at Darktrace, but we didn't run a side by side comparison to see which one would work better.

Vectra was the only tool in which we did a physical pilot or proof of concept. Vectra stood out for its simplicity and the general confidence that I had with the people whom I was engaging and having conversations with at that time. I am very much a people person. If I talk to people and don't get the impression they know what they're talking about, then that will reduce my confidence in their product. E.g., our initial engagement with Darktrace wasn't good enough to provide confidence in their platform, and we had to move quickly.

Make sure you have a dedicated resource committed to daily use of the tool. Because the selling point is it frees up your time, reducing the amount of time you need to spend on it so you don't have to commit resources. Then, you find yourself in an implementation two years later and you don't have committed resources who use it daily or are committed to it full-time. This means you don't maintain things like the triad rules and filters. Even though the sales material says it makes it easier and reduces alert fatigue, it doesn't give more time. You still need to have a dedicated resource to operate the tool, which we never committed at the beginning.

Having an established mature team structure is really important as well. Making sure people are aware of their role and how their role fits into the use of the tool is key. Whereas, we were building a security operation center (SOC) at the same time that we took on the tool, so our analyst activities have evolved around the incorporation of the tool into the organization and it's not necessarily a mature approach.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

The original use case was because we had some legacy stuff that doesn't do encryption at rest. Compliancy-wise, we had to put in some additional mitigating actions to protect it. That was the start of it. Then, we extended it to check other devices/servers within our network as well.

We are on the latest version.

It is doing some artificial intelligence. If it sees a server doing a lot of things, then it will assume that is normal. So, it is looking for anomalous behavior, things that are out of context which helps us reduce time. Therefore, we don't have to look in all the logs. We just wait for Vectra to say, "This one is behaving strange," then we can investigate that part.

We have implemented it fully now. We have done some training and filtering on it. Now, every alert that we see means that we need to investigate. It sees roughly 300 events a day. The majority are normal behavior for our company. So, there are about 10 to 15 events a day that we need to investigate.

The solution triages threats and correlates them with compromised host devices. It looks at a certain IP address, and if you're doing something strange, then it will give us an alert. E.g., normally John Doe is logged into it for four days, going to server XYZ. If all of a sudden, it's in a different timescale, going to server B, then it will send us an alert.

We have privileged accounts. They have a specific names, and if I see those names, then I investigate a bit more thoroughly. That's our policy. I don't know whether Vectra does anything different with them.

The solution gives us more tickets. If we did not have Vectra, we wouldn't have those tickets. So, it's actually increasing them. However, it is improving our security with a minimum amount of work. That's the whole purpose of the device. We have 10 to 15 events that we need to look into a day, and that is doable.

The solution creates more work for us, but it is work that we are supposed to do. We need more FTEs because we need more security.

We mainly use it for the detection types, checking dark IPS or command-and-control traffic. 

We bought Recall so we can have more information. Recall is an addition onto Vectra. We haven't enabled Recall yet, but we will. So, if there is an incident, we can investigate it a bit further with Vectra devices before going into other tools and servers. This gives us the metadata for network traffic. So, if we have a detection, we can check with Recall what other traffic we are seeing from that device, if there is anything else. It's mainly a quick and dirty way of looking at it and getting some extra information to see whether it's malicious.

We found that the solution captures network metadata at scale and enriches it with security information. This is one of the reasons why we added Recall, so the alert gives us information on where we need to look, then we can investigate a bit further. For example, a certain device is sending data to command-and-control server, then we can investigate whether that is really happening or just a false alarm with the metadata in Recall. It makes it easier to find out.

We would like to see more information with the syslogs. The syslogs that they send to our SIEM are a bit short compared to what you can see. It would be helpful if they send us more data that we can incorporate into our SIEM, then can correlate with other events. We have mentioned this to Vectra.

It does some things that I find strange, which might be the artificial intelligence. E.g., sometimes you have a username for a device, then it makes another. It detects the same device with another name, and that's strange behavior. This is one of the things that we have with Vectra support at the moment, because the solution is seeing the device twice. 

We started the pilot roughly a year ago. So, we started small with a pilot on part of the systems, then with two other vendors. Afterwards, we decided to buy it.

Now, it's almost in production. It's still a project in the end phase, as we are still implementing it. But, most of it has been running for a year.

So far, the stability has been good. There are no issues. It's never been down. It has been updating automatically on a regular basis and there are no issues with that where it has stopped working.

One person will be responsible for the deployment, maintenance, and physical upkeep; a person from the service delivery team will keep the device up and running. The security analysts (my team) deal with the alerts and filtering.

The part that we designed is not really scalable. They have options, and there is some room for improvement. If we need to scale up, which we have no intention of doing, then the physical devices need to be swapped over for a bigger one. Other than that, we have some leeway. This came up in the design with, "What are your requirements?" and those requirements have been met, so that's fine. They will probably be met for the foreseeable future.

At the moment, we don't have Tier 1 and Tier 2. Instead, we have a small team who does everything. I am mostly using it. There will be three security analysts. Then, we have a number of information security officers (ISOs) who will have a read-only role, where they can see alerts to keep an eye on them, if they want, and be able to view the logging and see if they need more information. But, there are three people who will be working with Vectra alerts.

We are in contact with the Vectra service desk. If you send them ideas, they talk about them and see if they can incorporate them.

We decided that we wanted to have an alert within 30 minutes, which is doable with this solution. It fulfills our needs. However, we didn't have this before, so it has increased our time, but for things we need to do.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward. They have security on a high level. There are a lot of logins with passwords and very long passwords. This made it go a bit longer. However, the implementation is relatively easy compared to other devices.

We made a design. That's what we implemented.

Initially, it was set up in conjunction with Vectra. When we put it into production, the majority was done by me, then checked by a Vectra engineer. If I had issues, I just contacted Vectra support and they guided me through the rest of it.

The Vectra team is nice and helpful. The service desk is fast. They know what they are doing, so I have no complaints on that part. We have a customer service person who knows about our environment and can ask in-depth questions. He came over as well for the implementation to check it, and that was fine. The work was well done.

The solution has reduced the time it takes us to respond to attacks. It sends an email to our SIEM solution. From that SIEM solution, we get emails and tickets. Therefore, the time between an alert coming up and a ticket is reduced. This is for tickets that we monitor regularly. Within 15 to 20 minutes, it gives us an alert for the things that we want. Thus, it has greatly reduced our measurable baseline.

The return of investment is we have tested it so sometimes we have auditors who do pen tests and see them. That's the goal. It seems to be working. We haven't found any actual hackers yet, so I'm not completely a 100 percent certain. However, we found auditors who are trying to do pen tests, which essentially the same thing.

The license is based on the concurrent IP addresses that it's investigating. We have 9,800 to 10,000 IP addresses. 

There are additional features that can be purchased in addition to the standard licensing fee, such as Cognito Recall and Stream. We have purchased these, but have not implemented them yet. They are part of the licensing agreement.

We investigated Darktrace, Vectra, and Cisco Stealthwatch.

Darktrace and Vectra plus Recall were similar in my opinion. Darktrace was a bit more expensive and complex. Vectra has a very nice, clean web GUI. It easier to understand and cheaper, which is one of the main reasons why we chose Vectra over Darktrace.

Darktrace and Vectra are very different, but eventually for what we wanted it to do, they almost did the same thing. Because Darktrace was a bit more expensive, it was a financial decision in the end.

I did the comparison between Darktrace and Vectra. They did almost the same thing. Sometimes, there are differences that Darktrace did detect and Vectra didn't. For the majority, we didn't find any actual hackers. So, it's all false positives, eventually. Both of them are very similar. The big thing is the hacker activity. They both detected it in the same way. But, in the details, they were different.

The options for Stealthwatch were a bit limited in our opinion for what we wanted it to do. Stealthwatch is network data, and that's it.

Start small and simple. Work with the Vectra support team.

The solution’s ability to reduce false positives and help us focus on the highest-risk threats is the tricky part because we are still doing the filtering. The things it sees are out of the ordinary and anomalous. In our company, we have a lot of anomalous behavior, so it's not the tool. Vectra is doing what it's supposed to do, but we need to figure out whether that anomalous behavior is normal for our company. 

The majority of the findings are misconfigurations of servers and applications. That's the majority of things that I'm investigating at the moment. These are not security risks, but need to be addressed. We have more of those than I expected, which is good, but not part of my job. While it's good that Vectra detects misconfiguratons, there are not our primary goal.

The solution is an eight (out of 10). 

We don't investigate our cloud at the moment.

One of the biggest things is the visibility of stopping or identifying any infection as soon as possible. In this case, if someone downloads something malicious to their workstation, we have a number of controls in place. However, it wasn't so much the endpoint. It was the spreading of a worm type scenario or a WannaCry type thing. Anything that could potentially spread after the initial infection, which is where we wanted to come in and get that visibility.

It was key for us to have something that we could use for identifying as soon as possible, which would be call center initiated. That was probably our biggest thing: To push it in that direction, as we're a regulated company from the FCA. They drive us continually for improvement and behavioral analysis. Network analysis sort of falls into that bucket.

We already have a SIEM, which some people would argue gives us a lot of that visibility. It doesn't tend to give it the focus that we need. From Vectra, we get a lot of alerts of, "This is happening," or, "This is unusual." This is a lot easier than waiting for a couple of logs to come in, then a bit of AI logic at the back of it to potentially push it in that direction. It's very much for us to get a view of a potential attack, then deal with it as quickly as possible. To pinpoint where it's coming from, and where it is going to go.

One of the biggest things that I wanted to ensure is that it covered our call centers because that is where I see my biggest risk. So, I was really key on getting sensors across all geographic locations within the UK and in all of our small communication rooms.

It is all on-premise. We have a number of call centers spread around the UK. We look at all east-west traffic, as well as north-south. It all goes into our brain in our data center. We do have some branches out in Azure, but we're waiting on the new plugin that they are trying to develop. We are just starting in on our cloud journey and most of our infrastructure is in still private cloud. We haven't really gotten to the point where we have public cloud.

We're up-to-date, but I don't know the exact version number that we are on.

The key improvement for us were:

1. The additional monitoring 24/7, and using the high fidelity alerting from Vectra rather than SIEM, This was our biggest change. We have managed to leverage that rather more than our SIEM, which just throws out loads of spam. 
2. The FCA requirements to build on behavior monitoring.
3. The use case of the call center with its high turnaround of staff who are perhaps not as clued in or engaged in our user awareness program as they could be. 
4. Lack of end user deployment is another big improvement. We wanted something that was easy to deploy, or get up and running really quickly. It took a couple of weeks to rid of the alerts that we didn't want, but the actual involvement from the network teams was minimal, which was really good for us because we just don't have the resource to spend a lot of time trying to configure devices.

We use the solution’s Privileged Account Analytics for detecting issues with privileged accounts. Although I haven't seen a huge amount of alerts. We have a quarterly QBR, and they mentioned it the day before the QBR and noticed an alert pop up.

One of the key things for us is we have an annual pen test (an internal one), that's not as involved as a full red team. But, it's enough for the pen test to sit with the SOC guys, then we put the different tool sets together, what they're doing, and how that reacts to our Vectra,  SIEM, and endpoint AV. To see what picks up where, so it gives us an ability to check those tool sets that we have.

From a Vectra point, it will pick up a number of different things. But, it will also miss a number of different things. That's how pen testers work. They work covertly. So, it's really good for us to see what we can do and what we can't. Then, that feedback goes back to Vectra. We say, "Okay, well why didn't we pick up this?" They'll come up with a reason or they'll take it away and find something out about it. That's really good and a nice part of the service. We get to check to make sure the tool sets are working, but we also provide feedback and they're very open to that type of feedback.

I believe the solution has increased our security efficiency. It's hard to prove without having a direct attack. But, I get challenged about ransomware from my board, to say, "How do we defend against ransomware?" That's a big topic. One of the key things was when Vectra went in, it saw a developer run a script, which essentially changed the names for a number of files and put a different extension on, but they were doing some development type work. That's how their script ran, and it identified that as ransomware, which is a great thing to say. 

Although there was no encryption or malice involved, it did create new files, rename files, and delete old files, which essentially is what ransomware does anyway. It followed the same sort of logic to it,  I can report that back. "We do have some protection. It wouldn't stop it. But we could limit the amount of damage that it may do." 

I don't know about other companies, but I get the feeling most people look to identify rather than block. We're not a high-end bank. We are not going to stop people working. We're going to investigate what they're trying to do. That's just our risk appetite. We have to work. Unless it's absolutely 100 percent, we won't stop them. We would just look at it afterwards. So, all our alerting, we don't have any orchestration at the back of it to say, "Okay, if this happens, then I'm going to play that port in a firewall or I'm going to drop that from there." We won't do that. Humans will all be part of that process. We'll get a call, then we will make a crisis management team decision, etc. That's how we operate.

If, for instance, our AV doesn't pick it up. I think that is where Vectra will come in. So, if somebody gets infected and maybe hasn't picked it up. That's where, if that worm spread and our endpoint signatures weren't up-to-date, they went into zero day, and nobody knew about it. Vectra would give us that opportunity. It would potentially give us something that would say, "Well, this is not normal. This machine does not communicate with all these other machines like it is now." That's where we see it coming in. It gives us that extra chance to stop a disaster before it happens, or at least limit the amount of potential output of damage that that an incident can do.

Zero days are always very difficult. If the AV vendor doesn't know about it, it's not going to be able to tell me about it, stop it, quarantine it, or do anything. Having a tool set like this, which monitors network traffic for anomalies, it gives us that chance. I can't say that it definitely will pick it up, but there's another opportunity for us to reduce the amount of damage that can be done.

It gives us the point of where something is happening, which is the key thing for us. (I know that there is a back-end recall, which probably gives a lot more data, but we don't use that.) We then leverage our SIEM product to provide us logs from those specific sources that it's talking about, giving us that information. It is the accuracy of: It is happening here and on this particular host, then it's going to here to this particular host. It's that focus which is probably the most advantageous to us.

The logic behind Vectra's ability to reduce alerts by rolling up numerous alerts to create a single incident or campaign for investigation grows with severity, as there are additional alerts around that particular host. This is a useful feature rather than spamming alerts. But, we've never really had an issue with a lot of alerts. We really do triage our alerts quite well and have a good understanding of what does what. 

One of the key advantages for us is we define a 24/7 service around it. We use far more of Vectra alerts than we do with our SIEM product because we understand that when we get an alert from Vectra we actually need to do something about it. You can't really say you don't get false positives, as the action has happened. It's whether we consider that action as a concern rather than a SIEM that sort of gives you a bit of an idea of, "That may be something you're interested in." Whereas, Vectra says, "This has happened. Is this something you would consider normal?" I think that's the bit that we like. It just says, "Is this normal behavior or isn't this normal?" Then, it's up to us to define whether that is or isn't, which we like. 

The solution provides visibility into behaviors across the full lifecycle of an attack in our network, beyond just the internet gateway, because we do east-west traffic. So, it looks at the entire chain across there. We're fortunate enough not to be in a position that we've seen a meaningful attack. When we do have pen testers come in, we can see quite clearly how they pick traffic up and how it develops from a small or medium alert to go to higher severity, then how it adds all those events together to give more visibility. 

The solution does a reasonable job of prioritizing threats and correlating them with compromised host devices. We use that as how we react to it, so we leverage their rating system. We are reasonably comfortable with it. At the end of the day, we actually spend a lot of time and effort to tweak it. It's never going to be right for every company because it depends on what your priorities are within the company, but we do leverage what they provide. If it is a high, we will treat it as a high, and we will have SLAs around that. If it's a low, we'll be less concerned, and the events that come out pretty much lead to that. The events that we see and the type of activity going on, it makes sense why it's a low, medium, or high. Just because a techie has done a port scan, that doesn't mean we need to run around shouting, "Who has done this?"

When we originally put it in, it was really quite interesting to see. Picking up the activities from the admin user and what they were doing, then going, "By the way, why have you done that?" Then looking at a scan and going, "Well, how did you know that?" So, it's sort of cool to pick up that type of stuff. We tend to trust what it tells us.

Room for improvement depends on how their strategy and roadmap develops, as they have a lot of third-parties that they integrate with, e.g., more orchestration around what alerts and what to do with afterwards. They don't pretend to be working in that space. That is a third-party type activity.

There are always the little things that they could do a bit better, like grouping or triage filters. Clearly, they've taken that onboard and developed those over the course of the last 18 months to two years to put these additional functions in. My guys are constantly saying, "Oh, it'd be useful to do this and useful to do that."

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. 

I have been using this solution for about two years.

Interestingly enough, when we first got Vectra, we had a number of problems with it. The guys were all over the solution trying to fix it. It turned out to be a hardware issue. I think they ended up changing their supplier. They just ripped everything out and put a load of new equipment in. This was identified about three months after it being here. 

These things happen. There's not a lot you can do about it. However, they were really good and didn't make any excuses, apart from, "It can only be the hardware," which it was. Once they put the new hardware in, everything went really well.

Very few people are required for maintenance. We just generally run the alerts now. I have a guy spend probably less than an hour a day, maybe less than that, putting out fires and alerts. Then we investigate that, depending on its severity. The actual hardware maintenance is nothing. We'll just keep an eye on it or get an alert if an interface has gone down.

One of the biggest things that we wanted to implement was something that was easy to do. Our problem, as well as I'm sure a number of other companies, is the amount of resources to install these new technologies, then how the resource center operates and uses these technologies. It's great having all these additional add-ons here, there and everywhere, but my team is quite small. So, it had to be quite easy. It has to be quite focused. Hence, we went with Vectra.

At the moment, we have a hardware brain and are not near the limit of that. To go from that, I think Vectra was looking at some sort of applied solution, but it would then be a change. So, we're down to limitations of the hardware. I always say, "If we bought a massive company, we would probably have to redesign and architect the solution." At the moment, they made sure that we have some growing room. 

Our purchase was a one time thing for the entire company, otherwise we would be leaving ourselves exposed. Just this week, I took a Vectra device up to a new company that we purchased and stuck it in there. It is really that simple. We'll probably end up with a bit of traffic because we will see a lot of new servers and workstations that we have to do triage around.

We have probably 3,500 to 4,000 users across the UK. My team is quite small. I have a couple of guys who are cyber-related.

The technical support is brilliant and really responsive. That is probably down to the fact that they are a small company. Their guys respond instantly, normally within the day that they have somebody online and having a look at it, or they're putting it away and the communication is excellent. They will say, "Okay, we'll put it back to the developers," and then they give us updates, which is really efficient.

Vectra is growing at the moment. They support us very well. They do seem to rely on key people. Would my service be the same if they got rid of our technical manager? I don't know. They are a small, close family team, which is really good. Whether that would change when it's a few key people left, I don't know. But I know they are growing as a company as well, so let's hope they scale it in proportion to their customer base. Only time will tell. Other companies I've got at the moment grew too quickly in the services and service suffered as a part of that.

It isn't a tool set to replace a current tool set. It's just an additional feature. For me, it has only increased our workload, but that's because we had nothing there before.

We did not previously have a network monitoring solution. We have a toolset that does event log monitoring, but nothing across the network itself. I think we have basic flow visiblity, and the network team use that. However, there is no real way of investigating individual network packets, then using them for anything in particular.

The initial setup was easy. We have multiple sites, so we had to go around and travel to different sites. However, the actual brain was conifgured in a few hours. Once it was up, it was up. The network guys did nothing after that point. My guys probably spent a couple of days, over the course of a month just tweaking it. Then, it gradually goes down as we get a new server pop up, which might add a bit of additional alerting. Once we get a handle on that, then it comes down to something really quite manageable.

The priority for us was to get the main call center up and running at the start. We needed the brain up and do the implementation to see the east-west traffic in our call center. Then, we brought on additional sites, depending on the size around the UK, as we monitored it. 

We used the Vectra guys for the implementation. Our technical engineer came in, going into the data centers with our network engineer (or remotely), then set it up.

For the actual deployment within the data center and around the sites, just two people were needed one form each company. After that, it was the configuration of the alerting which took one of the SOC guys suing Vectra for reference.

They provide us a health check and provide us with recommendations on what we need to do every quarter, which is perfect. There is nobody else who does that. That is probably part of the advantage of being a smaller company. 

Once every quarter, they'll put health and safety in, and say, "Alright, these are the new functions. This is what you need to turn on. That's not quite working. Those haven't fired. You might want to look at removing those." This is really good to see, because I get a lot of vendors, who once they've sold you a technology, they don't really care. They go, "Yep, there you go." They don't look at what you installed, how you've installed it, provide any recommendations, or look at how it's performing. 

This provides me the assurance my SOC guys are doing a good job, we are on top of any changes and the assurance we are getting the most of the solution.

Vectra has pretty much forced this upon us, which is really good because everyone is very busy. Before you know it, the months turn to years and disappear. 

ROI is a difficult one for security tools. You can argue that if you don't see anything where you did investment, this is the reason to have good security tools: not to have an incident. You only really know when bad things happen, and you're in the middle of it. Otherwise, it's doing what it needs to do to stop or identify an issue in the first place.

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. I think if we outgrow our current hardware, then we will have a look at bigger hardware or some sort of distribution. I'm sure they have a number of different options for larger companies. I don't see that being a major issue for us in the next three to five years.

We don't have complete visibility because we don't have all of that metadata surrounding it. Sometimes there might be more metadata before, it might be something afterwards, or there might be something missing, but we accept that because we don't have the funds to pay for the additional functionality that it can provide its a trade off.

When we started off, apart from money, we had to look at behavioral analysis. We weren't sure where we wanted to go with the solution, whether we wanted to look at the endpoint or network. So, after a RFI, to define which direction we wanted to go, we thought that we would go down the network analysis route.

Because we have call centers, there is normally a high turnover of staff. The jobs themselves are quite intense and people move around quite a lot, it was key for us to get some visibility in what those guys are doing. We thought, "Although we do a lot of user awareness and logging, this is probably where our weakest link is." It was a case of somebody potentially clicking on a malicious link, some sort of phishing attack which was probably, or is probably, going to cause us the most pain.

We looked at Darktrace and there was another option that dropped out. So, we looked at the main players in that area. We decided on the behavior analysis for network, then we took the top three: Vectra, Darktrace, and another solution. 

It came down to Darktrace and Vectra. Darktrace looked much prettier than Vectra, unfortunately the support that we'd heard about and reviews that we read, led to, "Here's the new tool set. Off you go". This is what we didn't want. We wanted somebody to hold our hand, then give us the support we needed to ensure we get the best out of the tool set.

It obviously comes down to price as well and we feel we picked the best product that fitted us. We did quite a lot of due diligence on both. I went to different places that got both installed and got references from both. I firmly believe that both products would have done the job well. However, the support from Vectra along with their customers' references to say how good it was, I think we made made the right decision.

People do a lot more than we actually see. Looking at the test and development guys, sometimes they do things that they don't understand. So, they will do it because it works. The actual things that are behind the scenes are the sort of things that happen, and they don't really understand. If there's something that's really complicated, they're people that have initiated it that don't really know what it is. That is always a problem, because in our sort of company, we have a lot of developers who are doing a lot of coding and things like that, but they're not 100 percent on all the other things that they affect, such as the supporting applications underneath it. 

They are making a change on one particular app, but it's using the other apps underneath it to develop that and push that across to something else. All these extra, different steps that they are completely oblivious to where we go, "Actually, you've just done this." They go, "Well, I don't know, I just ran the script over here. I don't know why that would happen." But, it'll do a LDAP lookup or connect to a share. Those are the sort of things that you get a lot of visibility from people who don't understand. So, that can become tricky. That's pretty much par for the course for a lot of security tool sets. Where you have a couple of people who know one particular aspect, but don't really understand everything that's going on. To be fair, IT is a big area. You can't expect everyone to know everything of everything, not when you're not working in a massive IT structure, and the security team is a small department.

You need to be quite key on your business case and what you're expecting from it. Be 100 percent sure on your use cases. It's an excellent tool. It doesn't create a huge amount of overhead, but it is a tool that you need to keep on top of. The more you keep on top of it and get it right at the start, the easier it will make your life going forward. Don't just stick it in, then leave it to whirl away as a lot of people do. You have to spend that bit of extra time, and it's not huge amount of time, and leverage other teams. 

The way they do their customer success is really good. There's nothing bad that I've got to say apart from the costs, but nothing's free, is it?

It has to be up there with my favorite security tool set at the moment. I am quite lean on scores, but the solution is definitely nine (out of 10). If I look at all my other security tool sets, this is the one that my guys value the most.