Cisco NGIPS vs Splunk User Behavior Analytics comparison

Cisco NGIPS (Next-Generation IPS) is a highly effective intrusion detection and prevention solution. It is designed to secure a user’s system from end to end and ensure that users are equipped to handle even the most sophisticated threats by offering them a high level of network visibility, threat intelligence, and security automation. Organizations across a wide variety of industries trust IPS to help them prevent unwanted intrusions from harming their networks.

Cisco NGIPS Benefits

Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy Cisco NGIPS include:

• Increased visibility. Cisco NGIPS enables users to gain a real-time view of all of the events that are taking place in their network. It gathers data from all corners of the network and uses it to provide organizations with context that can aid them in both proactively keeping themselves safe from harm and reactively addressing potential issues.

• Increased threat protection. NGIPS’ backbone is the core open Snort technology. This is the most widely used intrusion prevention software on the planet. It leverages this software to search for and detect vulnerabilities and anomalies that might otherwise go unnoticed. IPS is 99.7% effective at stopping threats.

• Flexibility. NGIPS can be customized so as to fit an organization’s specific security needs. Users can set the system so that it recognizes and seeks out threats that the organization defines as being of the highest level of concern.

Cisco NGIPS Features

• Security automation. NGIPS offers users a variety of powerful automation tools that can be leveraged to maximize a network’s protection. Analytics tools automatically examine intrusions and correlate them with known vulnerabilities in a user’s network.

• Integration suite. NGIPS enables users to integrate their security with many different cloud and application security services. Organizations can seamlessly combine the features that NGIPS offers with other platforms to bolster their effectiveness. This gives users the option to plug any feature hole that they might perceive.

• URL filter. NGIPS comes with a built-in filter that allows businesses to specify sources that the system should flag and block. This prevents known threats from causing significant harm to an organization’s network.

Reviews from Real Users

Cisco NGIPS is a highly effective solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Two major advantages are its easy-to-use GUI interface and the highly effective technical support that it offers users.

Aankit G., a consultant at Pi DATACENTERS, said, “The FTD has a GUI interface, which is very easy to work around with all the configurations. It is a client-based software based on Java. Now we have the GUI web interface, and it's very interactive and easy to navigate.”

Gebremichael T., a networking and security engineer at IE Network Solutions PLC, says, “The other aspect that I like is the technical support, who are highly capable. They were very good to us during the times that we used them and they tend to reply immediately to queries, even though you might not get the right engineer to help you right away. Tickets are usually assigned to junior staff at first but they do have escalation procedures, so if the support member can't solve the issue then they will immediately escalate it to higher management.”

Splunk User Behavior Analytics is a behavior-based threat detection is based on machine learning methodologies that require no signatures or human analysis, enabling multi-entity behavior profiling and peer group analytics for users, devices, service accounts and applications. It detects insider threats and external attacks using out-of-the-box purpose-built that helps organizations find known, unknown and hidden threats, but extensible unsupervised machine learning (ML) algorithms, provides context around the threat via ML driven anomaly correlation and visual mapping of stitched anomalies over various phases of the attack lifecycle (Kill-Chain View). It uses a data science driven approach that produces actionable results with risk ratings and supporting evidence that increases SOC efficiency and supports bi-directional integration with Splunk Enterprise for data ingestion and correlation and with Splunk Enterprise Security for incident scoping, workflow management and automated response. The result is automated, accurate threat and anomaly detection.