We performed a comparison between Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response and CRITICALSTART based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Managed Detection and Response (MDR) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The best part about Binary Defense MDR is that it runs on everything, and they keep an eye on things 24/7."
"Binary Defense has a human service department that provides live monitoring for our systems."
"The most valuable part of Binary Defense is its team of cybersecurity analysts. Their analysts filter out the noise and only forward the critical threats that require a response instead of false positives."
"One of the main benefits of Binary Defense MDR is the ability to easily meet with their support team to discuss any issues we encounter."
"The most valuable feature is reviewing tickets and the notes added by technicians."
"With Binary Defense, we don't just get an alert, but also a detailed rundown of why they're alerting us on it. They tell us what was executed, or the username, script, or IP. That way, we're not wasting time investigating."
"The most valuable features are the SIEM and the ticketing function; the latter is very smooth and easy to read and understand. We don't have any issues looking at the ticketing information when we're trying to identify what's going on."
"The case interface is Binary Defense MDR's most valuable feature."
"Arctic Wolf is our eyes and ears 24/7 because we can't possibly watch all of our alerts. We may see all of these alerts, but our attention is distracted because we're working on other things."
"The tool's most valuable feature is its ease of implementation."
"They provide useful quarterly updates."
"The visibility into our endpoints is huge."
"The integration between Cisco AMPs and the Windows servers is most valuable. So, they can also sandbox machines on which they see something suspicious."
"What's valuable about Arctic Wolf AWN CyberSOC is the cost savings it provides for companies that no longer have to hire a bunch of security people and pay for a SIM."
"The product provides integrations with several different SaaS applications."
"After an easy onboarding, the monitoring started immediately."
"There is a team of people who monitor our traffic and processes 24/7, so if anything raises a flag or alert, it will escalate back to me right away. That's the most incredible part: Humans working behind the scenes 24/7 to monitor our networks."
"The way that the user interface presents data enables our team to be able to make decisions significantly quicker, rather than have to dig into the details or go back to the original tools."
"The main difference between the other options and this one is the quality of the personnel within the SOC. It's their knowledge and depth and the way they handle customers."
"The new mobile app is awesome. It is one of the best I've ever seen. It's much better than its predecessor. It's more intuitive, a whole lot easier to navigate and get where you need to go. It's less repetitive and just generally easier to use. It allows me to not have to be sitting at my computer all the time. I can be on my phone or tablet or wherever I'm at. It makes it a lot easier to answer tickets and do that kind of thing."
"My impression of the transparency of the data is that it has good detail. It allows you to see how many events have come in, how many of those events have made it down to their analysts to review, and then however many from their analysts to be able to close out, have been able to been escalated to us. It's a good metric that we can share with my management. They see the value of what the SOC is bringing on top of what my team is already doing."
"There are two parts of CRITICALSTART's services that are most valuable to us. The MDR solution where they monitor our computers, laptops, and users across the board; and their knowledge of Palo Alto firewalls."
"I also use their mobile app. It's very easy to use and very convenient to be able to respond to alerts wherever you are. I love the app. You can respond and communicate, per ticket, with their SOC in near real-time. The response is very quick."
"Outside of using the platform to manage alerts, the feature of the service that we get the most value from is being able to reach out to them and say, "Hey, we might go buy a SIEM," for example. They give us their overview of what's out there, what they've dealt with, what they integrate with, and what that looks like. That's been pretty powerful over the years for us."
"I don't find any downside to them, but if I have to put one, it would be consistent manpower or staffing. The only area where the solution can be improved is going to be with people. As they grow, they are struggling with the same thing that every other company is, which is getting talent and getting that talent to stay, but they've just revised their tiering system to go from a flat analyst and manager to a three-tier solution where it goes through two or three before it gets elevated. That seems to have worked out well, so if one level misses it, the next one picks it up, and it works out fine."
"The only area I see for improvement with Binary Defense is their service portal. It could benefit from some enhancements."
"It's hard to think of anything that they need to improve on, but just to point out something, I would like to see them provide advanced XDR."
"The current reporting system could benefit from improvement."
"I would like to see more frequent check-ins with our security status."
"We should be able to isolate devices faster. They should shorten the time between clicking on a device to contain it and carrying out the action. That would be a welcome improvement."
"I would like to get more reports from Binary Defense about what they're blocking."
"We found that an earlier version of the agent had high memory usage and that was a bit concerning, but we raised the concern with their support team and they immediately replied that they had noticed the same thing and had a candidate fix already available... it totally fixed the issue."
"I would like to see them build the ability to co-sell an EDR platform, manage an EDR or manage the actual response, potentially from the issues that are coming up from the security risks."
"It can sometimes take up to an hour to get notification of a problem and that's a long time."
"They focus on detecting administrator-level control compromises. Because they're focusing more on administrator-level compromise, they are less able to see if an individual user has been compromised. It is, admittedly, very difficult because they don't know what normal human behavior is. If a hacker compromises a human account and then acts just like the human, how are you ever going to notice, unless you have some inside knowledge of how the company works? For example, they overlook account lockouts on user accounts, whereas in our own alerting system, we do not. We review every account lockout, and if it is bad, we contact the person, whereas they think of that as noise because they're more focused on the administrator-level compromise."
"They could probably expand on their integration tools. They can integrate with more security tools."
"It would be great if the whole process of determining vendor risk could be simplified by Arctic Wolf."
"In the future, I would like to see a summary report."
"It will be helpful if the dashboard is more granular."
"While it isn't a regular occurrence, there have been some gaps in response to some support questions. Questions get answered, yet there are times it takes longer than I'm comfortable with."
"In terms of responsiveness, when I open up an alert, sometimes it takes a bit of time to load. However, it only happened once or twice."
"The only thing I can think of that I would like to see, and I'm sure they could work this into a service pretty easily, is not only alerts on issues that are affecting my company, but some threat intelligence of a general nature on what's out there in the environment. That might be a nice add-in."
"The biggest room for improvement is not necessarily in their service or offering, but in the products that they support. I would like them to further their knowledge and ability to integrate with those tools. They have base integrations with everything, and we haven't come across anything. They should just continue to build on that API interface between their applications and other third-party consoles."
"They just did a user interface overhaul to the website portal that you use for troubleshooting tickets. The old one was fine. The new one is not intuitive..."
"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"The updated UI is actually pretty bad. Regarding the intuitiveness, it is fairly easy to use, but the responsiveness, on a scale of one to 10, is a one. It's really poor performance."
"It has frustrated us that they don't have a native Slack integration, because most things do now. That's something we've asked for, for years, and it just doesn't really seem like it's a priority."
"During the six-month integration and rollout, there were some bumpy roads along the way. There were communication breakdowns between the project manager, CRITICALSTART leadership, and us (as the customer). I expressed my displeasure during the integration in their inability to effectively communicate when there were holdups or issues. They were going through some growing pains at that time, but they have been right there for us ever since."
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Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response is ranked 2nd in Managed Detection and Response (MDR) with 17 reviews while CRITICALSTART is ranked 30th in Managed Detection and Response (MDR). Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response is rated 9.2, while CRITICALSTART is rated 9.4. The top reviewer of Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response writes "Very good support, excellent visibility, and useful security bulletins". On the other hand, the top reviewer of CRITICALSTART writes "Offers the ability to close review tickets or alerts through a mobile phone and to interact with engineers on their side via the app". Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response is most compared with CrowdStrike Falcon Complete, Red Canary, Huntress, Adlumin Security Operations Platform and Microsoft Defender Experts for Hunting, whereas CRITICALSTART is most compared with ReliaQuest GreyMatter, BlueVoyant CORE, CrowdStrike Falcon Complete and Red Canary. See our Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response vs. CRITICALSTART report.
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