We performed a comparison between Arista NDR and Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Darktrace, Vectra AI, Auvik and others in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA)."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 interface itself is clean and easy to use, yet customizable. I like that I can create my own dashboards fairly easily so that I can see what is important to me. Also, the query language is pretty easy to use. I haven't needed to use it a ton, but as I need to go in and do different queries based on their requests, it has been fairly simple to use."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Arista NDR's scalability is very good, making it easy to add more hardware components. You can order additional hardware and integrate it by stacking it with the existing setup. This feature cannot be seen in other NDR tools."
"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."
"The query language that they have is quite valuable, especially because the sensor itself is storing some network activity and we're able to query that. That has been useful in a pinch because we don't necessarily use it just for threat hunting, but we also use it for debugging network issues. We can use it to ask questions and get answers about our network. For example: Which users and devices are using the VPN for RDP access? We can write a query pretty quickly and get an answer for that."
"I found the initial setup process to be very simple and straightforward."
"The most valuable feature is SD-WAN."
"I have found that Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is easy to use, highly secure, and the main VPN tunnel is created automatically which is a benefit."
"The product's initial setup phase is easy."
"The central security management center and the content management center are very good."
"I have two offices, and I can route the internet of both offices using the same product. The connectivity is great."
"I don't have anything bad to say about the product. I absolutely love it."
"It provides decent protection for the LAN, especially in run mode."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The one thing that the Awake platform lacks is the ability to automate the ingestion of IOCs rather than having to import CSV files or JSON files manually."
"There's room for improvement with some of the definitions, because I don't have time and I'm not a Tier 4 analyst. I believe that is something they're working towards."
"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."
"Forcepoint would be improved if there were more training available."
"The ability to dynamically change policies could be improved."
"The solution's support could use improvement."
"Making this solution easier to use would be an improvement."
"The solution needs to add an antivirus profile and anti-spyware profile, not just policies and VPN."
"We feel the product's technical support could be better, as this relates to the solution itself, to the installation of the product, and to having a proper understanding of the case."
"They need to improve their alerts."
"Its interface is complex when compared with a firewall like FortiGate. Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall needs a management console, whereas FortiGate doesn't need any console. When you have a few devices, a console is not really necessary. It's good to have a private console only when you have a lot of devices."
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Arista NDR is ranked 8th in Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) with 14 reviews while Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is ranked 25th in Firewalls with 41 reviews. Arista NDR is rated 9.0, while Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is rated 7.6. 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 Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall writes "Provides decent protection for the LAN but complicated interface". Arista NDR is most compared with Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention, Vectra AI, Trend Micro Deep Discovery, Cisco Secure Network Analytics and Darktrace, whereas Forcepoint Next Generation Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention, Check Point NGFW, Sophos XG and Netgate pfSense.
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