For someone installing it for the first time, it's not that easy. Skybox offers installation services, but only for the first time. Partners who use these services get five days of online support from a Skybox engineer. After that, the partner is expected to manage on their own.

It's different from any typical antivirus solution. It's an enterprise-grade solution with fewer buyers, so when a partner installs it for the first time and shows it to the customer, professional services are usually needed. The next time, they won't need it, but they will need to explain it to the end user, who will manage it as an administrator.

For a complex network with many devices, firewalls, and more than 200 assets, deployment can take five days. It requires three to five people to communicate, check all the assets, and verify the model, but it's worth it.

Maintenance is easy once everything is set up. You just start the vulnerability management module, and it runs smoothly.

It is very easy to deploy. 

If the customer has around 100 firewalls, we can deploy the solution within a week, including all parameters.

I wasn't involved in the initial set process, and it has been almost ten to twelve years since the product got installed in my company. I am the only person in my company involved with the system's maintenance and support part, and everything is clear and simple with the solution.

The solution is deployed on-premises.

Setup can be tricky if you don't have experience. It can be a complicated product to install and operate. Most of the issues we've experienced don't relate to the tool itself but relate to the availability of data points. 

The solution needs to import conflicts from firewalls, network routers, vulnerability scanners, and maybe patch management solutions. Stakeholders are not only security teams but network teams that could be from Linux, Windows, a third-party provider, managed security, managed party, or managed IT providers. 

The complexity is not related to how well the solution works but the process for embedding it in a company. The biggest challenge is organizational complexity and selling the usefulness of the solution to all parties. The typical owner of the solution is the security team. If they don't have a good relationship with the networking team, then that team may not want to provide information about the configuration of firewalls or routers. Without this information, the security team is stuck, won't be able to find conflicts, and Skybox isn't doing anything. This complexity is typically on the organizational structure side and includes internal politics and complex service partners. 

The initial setup was easy. 

I have years of experience so setup is quite simple. 

It is important to understand networking and how various modules work. In general, a bit of training from the solution's partners is beneficial. 

The initial setup was extremely straightforward - the installation took about twenty minutes, but the integration took some more time because there were lots of different vendors and integrations. We also had some problems with login and port rules, which delayed integration. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It gets more complex only when you try to integrate with the logs.

The environment is very complex.

The deployment took a long time. We are considering changing it because it simply did not finish. It's as if we didn't do it properly.

We have a team of two to maintain this solution.

It's easy to install and deploy.

It took one month to deploy to all of the branches.

It is not complex.

Setup is not complex, but it is a little bit more time consuming because of the three-tier architecture. It scales really well, but that means there are more pieces to install during the setup, although it's not hard. Everything is just "click, click, click, next." You get through it really quickly. It's just a lot to do.

It also depends on how you deploy it. If you stand it up bare metal, it's a lot to do, but it's not exceedingly difficult. If you stand it up as an OVA, it's a five-minute installation. 

So it depends on which route you go on the installation.

The initial setup of Skybox Security Suite is straightforward. If you buy a virtual appliance, it's already set up. You only need to add layer three devices and the other sources for all the assets in the company. The documentation is easy to follow and useful.

The initial setup process is easy. However, the complexity depends on the customer's environment, including the broker and control management system of a specific cloud. It takes around three hours to complete the process and a month for system integration.

I would rate the solution's setup a ten out of ten and is straightforward. The product's deployment takes one week to complete. 

The initial setup was not straightforward at all. In fact, it was quite complex. We took about one and a half years to stabilize Skybox. It took far too much time.

It was definitely complex. It wasn't straightforward by any means. It's not something that a person who doesn't know the product can deploy. It's not a simple double-click on an MSI or an EXE and it starts running. The documentation needs a lot of improvement, the setup documentation. But we had brought in our Professional Services at the time of installation, so someone was here to do that installation. But if you were to ask me to do it from scratch, I would hesitate to do so because it was rather complicated even just looking at it.

The initial setup is easy.

Straightforward.

The initial setup with Skybox Security is hard. You need one or two strong security engineers on your team. We have that. One of my colleagues has great experience as a cybersecurity engineer officer. So we deployed, but during deployment we asked the Skybox team for support. You need to understand what you are doing and why you are doing it.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It didn't take us much time to deploy it and start using it.

Setup is relatively straightforward. There were a couple of things that I found a little difficult. They have an Add Firewall Wizard, but if you want to create a task list or a task group that runs on a certain schedule, it's almost easier to import the firewall as a task rather than using the wizard. You almost have to do the work twice if you do use the wizard. 

The other difficulty was, it really wasn't made clear that separating the server and the collector, for a certain number of firewalls or over, was a best practice. Having to go back and redo that was a little bit of a surprise.

But overall, it's relatively easy to use. There is a little bit of learning curve to figure out how to get the right information out of the reporting. But once you do it, it works.

The initial setup was complex, a little complex, but I think that is what the product entails. There was good documentation available on site from Skybox.

It was not so straightforward, but we bought onsite support from Skybox Professional Services.

The initial setup is easy.

The setup is straightforward; clear instructions.

The initial setup was very easy. It took us one week to deploy it.

Initial setup was simple because we approached the project in small steps.

The initial setup was easy.

The initial setup is straightforward, as you have a template for the network assurance.

This solution can be installed on-premises or as a cloud-based deployment with the virtual edition. The architecture for the latter is very simple. In a small environment with less than 1,000 devices, you can use one server, install the software, and it has a database associated with it. You just have to make sure that it can be accessed by every device across the VLAN.

The tricky part of the configuration has to do with vulnerability management, threat management, and change management. When it comes to difficulty, change management is the hardest one when it comes to configuration. The reason for this is that customers normally have their own change management solution, such as ServiceNow and they are not very comfortable offloading the ITSM to do change management. It's a hard shift and a difficult sell. If it is done properly, however, it can automatically identify the vulnerabilities and threats and mitigate them as per the change management policy. Workflows need to be defined. For example, when a firewall change is needed then it needs to know the chain of approval. Since every customer has their own approval or rejection procedure, it has to be based on their requirements.

When it comes to deployment, we use a "Land and Expand" strategy. We land with network assurance and firewall management, which gives the customer a taste of the product. From there, we onboard vulnerability management and threat management. I don't recommend to anybody that they start with this solution full-fledged because it will not necessarily yield a better ROI.

For a network of perhaps a thousand network devices, if all of the ports are open and the permissions are in place, then it should not take longer than two days. You can take one extra day for fine-tuning, but three days is more than enough. After this, it will take another two days for firewall management. When we consider the vulnerability management and threat management modules, we have to take them on a case-by-case basis.

Sometimes, a customer will not have a vulnerability management tool like Tenable or Rapid7, so we rely solely on the Skybox vulnerability database. We also integrate with endpoint solutions because of the importance of protecting them. As an example, if the customer is using McAfee for the endpoint protection then it will take me around three days to complete the integration. Certain vendors do not provide out of the box integration, so we have to use the API, which adds to the time required for deployment. Often, it can be done in three days.

Finally, change management is a tough thing to do that depends on the use cases. Without this aspect considered, I would say that the deployment can be completed in 15 days. This is all for a typical deployment. If the customer needs customization then it will change the deployment date.

The initial setup isn't so easy because many of our customers have issues getting all the configurations right. It's very complex.

The tool's deployment takes one month to complete.