We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Network Analytics and Vectra AI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."I believe this solution has reduced our incident response time."
"We find that Stealthwatch can detect the unseen."
"The most valuable feature of Cisco Secure Network Analytics is the Threat Intelligence integration."
"The fact that it can identify down to an IP address of a system that is causing problems, or potentially causing problems, is very valuable."
"Using this solution has helped us to detect and identify viruses or malicious activity in the network early on."
"The most valuable features provided by this solution are visibility and information."
"StealthWatch lets me see the ports running in and out and the country. It has excellent reporting, telemetry, and artificial intelligence features. With the telemetry, I can set thresholds to detect sudden changes and the alarms go through the PLC parts. I can see all the ports running on that trunk."
"Cisco Secure Network Analytics has increased the visibility of what is happening in our network, and I think that's the most important reason to use it. We can see what is really happening instead of just looking at numbers from routers or switches."
"The UI is easy to use and when we send detection to everybody, they easily understand what we are asking at the time."
"Vectra AI generates relevant information."
"Cognito Streams gives you a detailed view of what happens in the network in the form of rich metadata. It is just a super easy way to capture network traffic for important protocols, giving us an advantage. This is very helpful on a day-to-day basis."
"It does a reliable job of parsing out the logs of all the network traffic so that we can ingest them into our SIEM and utilize them for threat hunting and case investigations. It is pretty robust and reliable. The administration time that we spend maintaining it or troubleshooting it is very low. So, the labor hour overhead is probably our largest benefit from it. We spend 99% of our time in Vectra investigating cases, responding to incidents, or hunting, and only around 1% of our time is spent patching, troubleshooting, or doing anything else. That's our largest benefit from Vectra."
"The biggest feature for us, because we are heavy Microsoft users, is its integration with Office 365. On top of Vectra AI, we use all of the Microsoft security platforms, such as Defender ATP and Sentinel. Having full integration and a central platform to look at all of the threats that are coming through from the different platforms is a huge benefit for us."
"We often use the new feature to create PCAP files from the whole data traffic. It makes it much easier to find network problems such as whether the server is responding to a request. It has nothing to do with security, but it helps a lot to find other problems."
"The most useful feature is the anomaly detection because it's not signature-based. It picks up the initial part of any attack, like the recon and those aspects of the kill chain, very well."
"One of the things that we didn't expect to happen was that our network team also jumped on it faster than we thought. In most cases, if it's a security tool that's working on the network part, they can also use it to find out certain flaws that have been in the system. Certain flaws, related to some legacy stuff, were already there for quite a few years, which they couldn't explain at first, but we could explain them based on the timing of certain things."
"Some of our customers find this solution to be a little bit tough because they don't understand how to configure and use it."
"The initial setup is complex, as there is a lot to configure."
"If they can make this product more web-based, that would be amazing."
"Many of these tools require extensive on-premises hardware to run."
"I would like to see interoperability with other Cisco products because we have ThousandEyes, Cisco Prime, and others. The interaction among these is important to us."
"We've run into some issues with the configuration."
"One thing I would like to see improved is if it could automatically be tied through ISE, instead of you having to manually get notifications and disable it yourself."
"Stealthwatch is still maturing in AI. It uses artificial intelligence for predictions, but AI still needs to mature. It is in a phase where you get 95% correct detection. As its AI engine learns more, it will become more accurate. This is applicable to all the devices that are using AI because they support both supervised and unsupervised machine learning. The accuracy in the case of supervised machine learning is dependent on the data you feed into the box. The accuracy in the case of unsupervised machine learning is dependent on the algorithm. The algorithm matures depending on retrospective learning, and this is how it is able to detect zero-day attacks."
"In education as a sector, we are looking at AI a lot in terms of how it can be used as part of the teaching and learning side of things. It would be great to have Vectra AI look at a better way to enhance the security posture related to the AI tools in our portfolio."
"Some of their integrations with other sources of data, like external threat feeds, took a bit more work than I had hoped to get integrated."
"It does a little bit of packet capture on alert so you can look at the packet capture activity going on, but it doesn't collect a whole lot of data. Sometimes it's only one or two frames, sometimes it does collect more. That's why they have the addition of their Recall platform, because that really does help expand the capability."
"If you hit a certain number of rules, triage filters, or groups, the UX responds more slowly. However, we have a complex network and a lot of rules. So, our setup might not be a typical implementation example. We even had UX engineers onsite, and they looked at issues, improvements, and user feedback. Since then, it has gotten a lot better, they even built in features that we specifically requested for our company."
"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."
"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."
"Integration with other security components needs improvement. It should have true integration as opposed to just being a separate pane of glass."
"We are using SMB 3.0, which is an encrypted protocol. When we get some alerts or something, we cannot go deep into the protocol to see what's wrong because it's encrypted. We need to decrypt the protocol in another way, which is quite difficult. We might go back to SMB 2.0 just for this reason, but that's not a good solution."
More Cisco Secure Network Analytics Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco Secure Network Analytics is ranked 4th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 57 reviews while Vectra AI is ranked 2nd in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 40 reviews. Cisco Secure Network Analytics is rated 8.2, while Vectra AI is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Network Analytics writes "Increased the visibility of what is happening in our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Vectra AI writes "Integrates well with other security solutions and provides good technical support". Cisco Secure Network Analytics is most compared with Darktrace, Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics, ThousandEyes, Arista NDR and Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline, whereas Vectra AI is most compared with Darktrace, ExtraHop Reveal(x), Arista NDR, Corelight and Trend Micro Deep Discovery. See our Cisco Secure Network Analytics vs. Vectra AI report.
See our list of best Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) vendors and best Network Detection and Response (NDR) vendors.
We monitor all Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
CylancePROTECT is AI-powered endpoint protection that will scan your endpoint devices with AI and Machine Learning security. It does not work with traditional signature-based protection and will cover your endpoints against the latest malware and event Potential Unwanted Programs. We are also a Darktrace partner and if interested we can demo both Cyber Security solutions to your company. If you are interested in more information about CylancePROTECT and Darktrace and would like to run a free POC, please contact me at cj@groveis.com.
Raffael Marty, Vice President, Forcepoint Research and Intelligence, said: "There is no artificial intelligence in the field of information security, and it is unlikely to be developed in 2019." Most of unsupervised machine learning-based network anomaly detection solution does not provide why the anomaly has been aroused and whether the anomaly is malicious or not. Most of such solution's pricing model is based on number of endpoints but I prefer to have flat fee subscription-based.
The most important thing to get traction is your business approach and some kind of openness for 3rd parties. NOBODY needs "fancy Dashboards"!
Most of the known vendors like Darktrace is extremely "sales offensive" and they don't have a clear sales strategy (direct or channel). A free POV (30days) is a common approach to attract new customers, but the outcome is not really important. It says nothing about the PAINS on the customer site.
Know your competitors!!!! There are many AI CyberSec Startups and Technologies - 99% are using "Machine Learning" what needs more time to the realtime reaction in critical phases. Preferred is Deep Learning like DeepInstinct offers.
Pricing Model per IP´s is pretty usual - but you need flexibility.
Thank you I’m not really interested in being sold to. I’m asking about what works, what doesn’t and pricing models. I don’t want any demos.
Thank you for your comments...what if the malware does not present as anomalous?
We are an Endpoint focused firm represented a Pyramid of EP based protection services (email & web filter, coupled with EP protection, cyber insurance and dark web monitoring). Our key AI product offering is Cylance, world class in it's ability to protect you where over 95% of all hacks occur, the End Point. Cylance is typically sold as a manged service due to some of the complexities of tailoring the product to fit your business needs. Typically the service is price per EP, per month.
Thank you, I am familiar with Darktrace and really like the product. I'd like to know your thoughts on additional features and pricing preferences.
In my opinion, the best response always comes from the source. I have many contacts at Darktrace that can precisely answer these and other questions. Please let me know if you would like me to arrange for a scheduled call.