Nmap and Cisco Secure Network Analytics are products competing in the network security and analysis category. Nmap has the upper hand in cost-effectiveness due to its open-source model, while Cisco Secure Network Analytics offers advanced features for comprehensive security monitoring, justifying its higher cost.
Features: Nmap provides capabilities like network mapping, port scanning, and vulnerability discovery, making it suitable for initial security assessments. Cisco Secure Network Analytics includes advanced threat detection, behavioral analysis, and comprehensive reporting, fitting for organizations requiring thorough network monitoring.
Room for Improvement: Nmap could enhance its user interface to make it more accessible to less experienced users, improve reporting capabilities for better insights, and expand its integration support with other security tools. Cisco Secure Network Analytics might benefit from streamlining its setup process, reducing costs to appeal to smaller enterprises, and enhancing user experience for more intuitive navigation.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Nmap’s deployment is straightforward, allowing quick setup and network scanning, especially for those familiar with command line operations. Cisco Secure Network Analytics involves a more complex setup but offers comprehensive customer support and training resources to aid deployment and utilization.
Pricing and ROI: Nmap is free, with minimal setup costs, appealing to budget-conscious organizations seeking basic network analysis. Cisco Secure Network Analytics requires a significant investment, yet its advanced capabilities provide a substantial return on investment for organizations needing extensive network surveillance and threat prevention.
Cisco Secure Network Analytics is a highly effective network traffic analysis (NTA) solution that enables users to find threats in their network traffic even if those threats are encrypted. It turns an organization’s network telemetry into a tool that creates a complete field of vision for the organization’s administrators. Users can find threats that may have infiltrated their systems and stop them before they can do irreparable harm.
Cisco Secure Network Analytics Benefits
A few ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy Cisco Secure Network Analytics include:
Cisco Secure Network Analytics Features
Some of the many features that Cisco Secure Network Analytics offers include:
Reviews from Real Users
Cisco Secure Network Analytics is a solution that stands out even when compared to many other comparable products. Two major advantages that it offers are the way that it enables users to define the threshold at which the solution will issue a warning to administrators and the predefined alerts that it offers straight out of the box.
Gerald J., the information technology operations supervisor at Aboitiz Equity Ventures, Inc., writes, “StealthWatch lets me see the ports running in and out and the country. It has excellent reporting, telemetry, and artificial intelligence features. With the telemetry, I can set thresholds to detect sudden changes and the alarms go through the PLC parts. I can see all the ports running on that trunk.”
A senior security engineer at a tech services company, says, “Cisco Stealthwatch has predefined alerts for different types of security issues that might happen in the network. Whether it's PCs or servers that are used for botnets or Bitcoin mining we receive the alerts automatically. This functionality is what we receive from the solution out of the box.”
Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network discovery and security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Nmap uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine what hosts are available on the network, what services (application name and version) those hosts are offering, what operating systems (and OS versions) they are running, what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use, and dozens of other characteristics. It was designed to rapidly scan large networks, but works fine against single hosts. Nmap runs on all major computer operating systems, and official binary packages are available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. In addition to the classic command-line Nmap executable, the Nmap suite includes an advanced GUI and results viewer (Zenmap), a flexible data transfer, redirection, and debugging tool (Ncat), a utility for comparing scan results (Ndiff), and a packet generation and response analysis tool (Nping).
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