Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine) vs Securonix Next-Gen SIEM comparison

Cisco ISE is an all-in-one solution that streamlines security policy management and reduces operating costs. Cisco ISE delivers visibility and access control over users and devices across wired, wireless, and VPN connections.

Identity Services Engine enables enterprises to deliver secure network access to users and devices. It shares contextual data, such as threats and vulnerabilities, with integrated solutions from Cisco technology partners. You can see what is happening in your network, which applications are running, and more.

Features of Cisco ISE

• Centralized management helps administrators configure and manage user profile characteristics - a single pane of glass for integrated management services.
• Contextual identity and business policy: The rule-based attribute is a driven policy model. The goal is to provide flexible access control policies.
• Wide range of access control options, including Virtual LAN (VLAN) URL redirections, and access control lists.
• Supplicant-less network access: You can roll out secure network access by deriving authentication from login information across application layers.
• Guest lifecycle management streamlines the experience for implementing and customizing network access for guests.
• Built-in AAA services: The platform uses standard RADIUS protocol for authentication, authorization, and accounting.
• Device auditing, administration, and access control provide users with access on a need-to-know and need-to-act basis. It keeps audit trails for every change in the network.
• Device profiling: ISE features predefined device templates for different types of endpoints.
• Internal certificate authority: Qn easy-to-deploy single console to manage endpoints and certificates.

Benefits of Cisco ISE

Cisco’s holistic approach to network access security has several advantages:

• Context-based access based on your company policies. ISE creates a complete contextual identity, including attributes such as user, time, location, threat, access type, and vulnerability. This contextual identity is used to enforce a secure access policy. Administrators can apply strict control over how and when endpoints are allowed in the network.
• Better network visibility via an easy-to-use, simple console. In addition, visibility is improved by storing a detailed attribute history of all endpoints connected to the network.
• Comprehensive policy enforcement. ISE sets easy and flexible access rules. These rules are controlled from a central console that enforces them across the network and security infrastructure. You can define policies that differentiate between registered users and guests. The system uses group tags that enable access control on business rules instead of IP addresses.
• Self-service device onboarding enables the enterprise to implement a Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) policy securely. Users can manage their devices according to the policies defined by IT administrators. (IT remains in charge of provisioning and posturing to comply with security policies.)
• Consistent guest experiences: You can provide guests with different levels of access from different connections. You can customize guest portals via a cloud-delivered portal editor with dynamic visual tools.

Support

You can get ISE as a physical or virtual appliance. Both deployments can create ISE clusters that create scale, redundancy, and requirements.

Licensing

Cisco ISE has four primary licences. Evaluation for up to 100 endpoints with full platform functionality. The higher tiers are Partner, Advantage and Essential.

Reviews from Real Users

"The user experience of the solution is great. It's a very transparent system. according to a PeerSpot user in Cyber Security at a manufacturing company.

Omar Z., Network & Security Engineer at an engineering company, feels that "The RADIUS Server holds the most value."

“Whether I deploy in China, the US, South Africa, or wherever, I can get all the capabilities. It allows me to directly integrate with 365, and from a communications point of view, that is a good capability," says Rammohan M., Senior Consultant at a tech services company.

Hassan A.,Technology Manager at Advanced Integrated Systems, says that "The most valuable feature is the integration with StealthWatch and DNA as one fabric."

Securonix Security Analytics SNYPR is a next-generation security analytics platform that transforms big data into actionable security intelligence, enabling you to take care of so much more than simply your SIEM (security information and event management) needs. In addition, it contains all of the tools that you may need to enable your organization to successfully handle both log management as well as UEBA (user and entity behavior analytics)-related tasks. The SNYPR management platform gives users the ability to combine security orchestration, automation, and response, security information and event management, network traffic analysis, and user and entity behavior analytics. This single technical environment does away with your need for multiple security, management, and analytics solutions.

Securonix Security Analytics SNYPR’s unified platform can be scaled up to handle up to one million security events every second. While this load may seem heavy, SNYPR handles it with ease. It is able to reduce incidents of false security positives by 60%. The access certification workload that IT administrators and managers need to deal with can be reduced by as much as 90%.

The model that this platform uses is based on a machine learning algorithm. This model gives Securonix Security Analytics’s SNYPR platform a number of extremely valuable capabilities. The platform gathers many different types of data and applies what it learns to threats as they arise. The system assigns threats risk values to determine where the areas of highest need are. Machine learning also allows you to respond to slow acting threats by using historical data to inform your response.

All of the data that the system gathers is stitched together and used to create a complete picture of the risks that the system faces. Any blind spots that may exist are exposed by the collaborative UI that compiles the system data in a single location. This also increases your ability to monitor advanced application threats. 

Key Features

Some of Securonix Security Analytics’s SNYPR platform’s key features include:

• The ability to enrich all data that the SNYPR platform collects. When SNYPR gathers information, it applies relevant data which can be used in the future to gauge whether or not a particular event is a threat.
• The ability for data redundancy to automatically take place. All of the data that is gathered, analyzed, and processed by SNYPR is automatically copied and distributed across the system. If there is a failure in any particular part of the system, the information will still be preserved.
• The ability to track historical issues and use that information to help deal with current threats. The SPOTTER feature allows analysts to look back at both old data and the contextual information that is attached to it. They can then use that data to inform their responses to similar threats that they are currently dealing with.

Reviews from Real Users

Securonix Security Analytics SNYPR platform stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its ability to significantly reduce the number of false positives that administrators have to deal with and the way that it incorporates contextual information into security events to reduce the time spent finding solutions to problems that arise.

Peerspot users note the effectiveness of these features. One user wrote, “Securonix’s analytics-driven approach for helping to find sophisticated threats and reduce false positives is pretty good. We are allowed to fine-tune according to our requirements and our clients' requirements, which does reduce false positives. In the last 24 hours, the total number of policies with triggers was 233. When I started with this product, the false positives were 561. Therefore, the solution has helped by tuning or reducing false positives.”

Another user noted, “The way that a Securonix is able to put a lot of the contextual information into the events is very helpful. That has reduced the amount of time required for investigating, ‘Hey, this might be something I need to look at,’ and then doing further research. It puts all of those violations in one event or case, so that you can look at different types of violations that all correlate. That has reduced the amount of time for researching some of those cases. It's dependent upon the scenario, but in some cases it could save an hour of going out and doing a bunch of individual searches.”