We performed a comparison between Arista NDR and Cisco Secure Network Analytics 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.
"Other solutions will say, "Hey, this device is doing something weird." But they don't aggregate that data point with other data points. With Awake you have what's called a "fact pattern." For example, if there's a smart toaster on the third floor that is beaconing out to an IP address in North Korea, sure that's bizarre. But if that toaster was made in North Korea it's not bizarre. Taking those two data points together, and automating something using machine-learning is something that no other solution is doing right now."
"The most valuable portion is that they offer a threat-hunting service. Using their platform, and all of the data that they're collecting, they actually help us be proactive by having really expert folks that have insight, not just into our accounts, but into other accounts as well. They can be proactive and say, 'Well, we saw this incident at some other customer. We ran that same kind of analysis for you and we didn't see that type of activity in your network.'"
"The security knowledge graph has been very helpful in the sense that whenever you try a new security solution, especially one that's in the detection and response market, you're always worried about getting a lot of false positives or getting too many alerts and not being able to pick out the good from the bad or things that are actual security incidents versus normal day to day operations. We've been pleasantly surprised that Awake does a really good job of only alerting about things that we actually want to look into and understand. They do a good job of understanding normal operations out-of-the-box."
"This solution’s encrypted traffic analysis helps us stay in compliance with government regulations. It is all about understanding data exfiltration, what is ingressing and egressing in our network. One common attack vector is exfiltrating data using encryption. My capabilities to see potential data exfiltration over encrypted traffic is second to none now."
"We appreciate the value of the AML (structured query language). We receive security intel feeds for a specific type of malware or ransomware. AML queries looking for the activity is applied in almost real-time. Ultimately, this determines if the activity was not observed on the network."
"It gives us something that is almost like an auditing tool for all of our network controls, to see how they are performing. This is related to compliance so that we can see how we are doing with what we have already implemented. There are things that we implemented, but we really didn't know if they were working or not. We have that visibility now."
"When I create a workbench query in Awake to do threat hunting, it's much easier to query. You get a dictionary popup immediately when you try to type a new query. It says, "You want to search for a device?" Then you type in "D-E," and it gives you a list of commands, like device, data set behavior, etc. That gives you the ability to build your own query."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to see suspicious activity for devices inside my network. It helps me to quickly identify that activity and do analysis to see if it's expected or I need to mitigate that activity quickly."
"The most valuable feature we got out of Stealthwatch is to be able to, while troubleshooting, go deep into one of our interfaces and verify what the bandwidth is and if there's any activity there that's causing problems."
"The most valuable feature is anomaly detection, where it finds things that are not allowed internally."
"The most valuable feature about this solution is that it gives me insight of my network."
"The beginning of any security investigation starts with net flow data."
"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."
"Most valuable features are the network maps and server and network response time."
"The most valuable feature is NetFlow. The beginning of any security investigation starts with NetFlow data."
"The ability to send data flow from other places and have them all in one place is very valuable for us."
"When I looked at the competitors, such as Darktrace, they all have prettier interfaces. If Awake could make it a little more user-friendly, that would go a long way."
"I would like to see the capability to import what's known as STIX/TAXII in an IOC format. It currently doesn't offer this."
"While the appliance is very good, and I think they're working on it, it would probably help if they integrated the management team cases into the appliance so that everything we are working on with them would be accessible on our platform, on the dashboard, on the portal. Right now, Awake is just an additional team that uses the appliance that we use and then we communicate with them directly. Communication isn't through the portal."
"They've been focused on really developing their data science, their ability to detect, but over time, they need to be able to tie into other systems because other systems might detect something that they don't."
"One thing I would like to see is a little bit more education or experience on AWS cloud for their managed services team. We've explained how we have the information set up, that the traffic coming in goes to the AWS load balancer and then gets sent on to our internal servers... but when I get notices they always tell me this traffic is coming from the IPs belonging to the load balancers, not the source IPs. So a little bit more education for their team about how AWS manages the traffic might help out."
"I enjoy the query language, but it could be a bit more user-friendly, especially for new users who come across it... They should push it more into a natural language style as opposed to a query language."
"One concern I do have with Awake is that, ideally, it should be able identify high-risk users and devices and entities. However, we don't have confidence in their entity resolution, and we've provided this feedback to Awake. My understanding is that this is where some of the AI/ML is, and it hasn't been reliable in correctly identifying which device an activity is associated with. We have also encountered issues where it has merged two devices into one entity profile when they shouldn't be merged. The entity resolution is the weakest point of Awake so far."
"Awake Security needs to move to a 24/7 support model in the MNDR space. Once they do that, it will make them even better."
"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."
"If they can make this product more web-based, that would be amazing."
"Complexity on integration is not so straightforward and you really need an expert to help build it out."
"Cisco could improve the administration for the customers."
"The ability to be natively integrated into Port Aggregator would be beneficial because it would reduce just one more component that's needed in order to have that type of view."
"I would like to see it better organized when I'm looking at it."
"The visualization could be improved, the GUI is not the best."
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Arista NDR is ranked 8th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 14 reviews while Cisco Secure Network Analytics is ranked 4th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 57 reviews. Arista NDR is rated 9.0, while Cisco Secure Network Analytics is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Arista NDR writes "Gives us network layer visibility into things that may not be covered by other monitoring tools, such as shadow IT". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco Secure Network Analytics writes "Increased the visibility of what is happening in our network". Arista NDR is most compared with Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention, Vectra AI, Trend Micro Deep Discovery, Darktrace and ExtraHop Reveal(x), whereas Cisco Secure Network Analytics is most compared with Darktrace, Cisco Secure Cloud Analytics, ThousandEyes, Vectra AI and Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline. See our Arista NDR vs. Cisco Secure Network Analytics report.
See our list of best Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) vendors and best Network Detection and Response (NDR) vendors.
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