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Illumio vs Vectra AI comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Illumio
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Cloud and Data Center Security (3rd), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (14th), Microsegmentation Software (3rd)
Vectra AI
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS) (2nd), Network Detection and Response (NDR) (2nd), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (9th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (5th), AI-Powered Cybersecurity Platforms (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Network Security Systems solutions, they serve different purposes. Illumio is designed for Cloud and Data Center Security and holds a mindshare of 23.9%, up 16.9% compared to last year.
Vectra AI, on the other hand, focuses on Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS), holds 11.9% mindshare, up 9.9% since last year.
Cloud and Data Center Security
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Software (IDPS)
 

Featured Reviews

Alark Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Visual traffic interface aids in network micro-segmentation while a streamlined update option enhances process efficiency
The strongest aspect of Illumio is the visual traffic interface, which allows us to see all traffic that communicates with our servers and allied companies. We can write rules that can be embedded into the IP table, making it easy to handle. Illumio enables us to see network flows, traffic sources, and destinations. The policy generation and enforcement capabilities are valuable, allowing for selective enforcement. Illumio helps in audit purposes by saving data and showing blocked traffic, ensuring no outside traffic is allowed.
Mohammad Alkurdi - PeerSpot reviewer
Innovative detection features enhance monitoring
The advantages of the integration are not entirely out-of-the-box. You have to do it manually. When I'm doing tier response, an out-of-the-box solution is not available. You need to have a Linux server, and from the Linux server, you must perform AI tasks, and there is a lot to be handled in the back end. This is a major consideration about them. The recall feature, if it can be placed in some areas instead of the cloud, and charged for, would be better. Recall the storage where you watch all the traffic, and you can recall it and try to analyze it in the back end. It’s cloud-based. If they offer it on-prem, it would be better. I think they have a solution, but I have never tested it, to be honest with you.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The solution is easy to use."
"I would recommend Illumio to all sizes of companies."
"The tool helps with my company's security posture."
"The dependency map is most valuable feature."
"Customer support is excellent."
"The flexibility of the solution is its most valuable feature."
"The product provides visibility into how the applications communicate and how the network protocols are being used."
"It has helped us to understand internal network visibility and firewall policy implementation. We use the product to simplify firewall policy implementation."
"Vectra AI helped our team be more productive and save time. We have less work thanks to it."
"One of the most valuable features of the platform is its ability to provide you with aggregated risk scores based on impact and certainty of threats being detected. This is both applied to individual and host detections. This is important because it enables us to use this platform to prioritize the most likely imminent threats. So, it reduces alert fatigue follow ups for security operation center analysts. It also provides us with an ability to prioritize limited resources."
"The UI is easy to use and when we send detection to everybody, they easily understand what we are asking at the time."
"The solution provide visibility into behaviors across the full lifecycle of an attack in our network, beyond just the Internet gateway. It makes our security operations much more effective because we are now looking not just at traffic on the border, but we're looking at east-west internal traffic. Now, not only will we see if an exploit kit is being downloaded, but we would be able to see then if that exploit kit was then laterally distributed into our environment."
"We particularly like the user experience around the dashboard, which we find to be much more straightforward than the dashboard of some of the competitive products... Vectra is a really easy system to understand and use to prioritize where we need to focus our security resources."
"One of the most valuable features is all the correlation that it does using AI and machine learning. An example would be alerting on a host and then alerting on other things, like abnormal behavior, that it has noticed coming from the same host. It's valuable because we're a very lean team."
"The most valuable feature for Cognito Detect, the main solution, is that external IDS's create a lot of alerts. When I say a lot of alerts I really mean a lot of alerts. Vectra, on the other hand, contextualizes everything, reducing the number of alerts and pinpointing only the things of interest. This is a key feature for me. Because of this, a non-trained analyst can use it almost right away."
"One of the key advantages for us is we define a 24/7 service around it. We use far more of Vectra alerts than we do with our SIEM product because we understand that when we get an alert from Vectra we actually need to do something about it."
 

Cons

"Illumio Adaptive Security Platform could improve by supporting more operating systems. For example, Cisco and Apache appliances."
"The solution is very basic and doesn't do anything other than the orchestration of layer four endpoint firewall rules."
"I have not had the chance to experiment deeply with it."
"It requires a low-level re-architecting of the product."
"I would like to see better data security in the product."
"We need more details on areas where there is an error or a traffic blockage. I would like the tool to offer a more detailed view."
"The interaction we've had with the support team hasn't been ideal. Technical support should be improved."
"The product’s agents don't work very well in OT environments."
"Some of the customization could be improved. Everything is provided for you as an easy solution to use, but working with it and doing specific development could be worked on a bit more in the scope of an incident response team."
"The solution needs to become more proactive. When Vectra AI is the primary solution in an environment - like it is in our case - you must work on response time. We have a small team so response time at endpoint level is vital."
"A blind spot that I have is around the ease with which you can automate threat intervention."
"They use a proprietary logging format that is probably 90% similar to Bro Logs. Their biggest area of improvement is finishing out the remaining 10%. That 10% might not be beneficial to their ML engine, but that's fine. The industry standard is Zeek Logs or Bro Logs, or Bro or Zeek, depending on how old you are. While they have 90% of those fields, they're still missing some fields. In very rare instances, some community rules do not have the fields that they need, and we had to modify community rules for our logs. So, their biggest area of improvement would be to just finish their matching of the Zeek standard."
"The solution has not reduced the security analyst workload in our organization because we still need to SIEM. Unfortunately, while Vectra, for us, is a brilliant tool for network investigations, giving wonderful visibility, it doesn't go the whole way to replace our SIEM that is needed for compliance. So, I still have the same amount of alerting and logging that I did before. It gives us more defined ability to see incidents, but it doesn't give us enough information to satisfy a PCI or 27001 audit."
"Vectra Recall could be utilized much more, and I'm seeing some indications of that today with the investigative components. I use the Visualize feature to visualize components and dashboards a lot. I'm interested in new ways to build automated searches or having them leveraged already from Vectra."
"What is most important for us is to have one place where we can manage a few brains because we are based on a zero-trust network. As a result, each customer needs to have a separate brain. For the SOC team, we need to have one place where the SOC analyst can go to visit the website and from that site manage all of the customers. Right now, Vectra AI doesn't have this capability, and I would really like to have this feature."
"I'd like to be able to get granular reports and to be able to output them into formats that are customizable and more useful. The reporting GUI is lacking."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a subscription needed to use Illumio Adaptive Security Platform and we pay every three years. Overall the solution is expensive."
"The product's pricing is around 10,000-15,000 USD. The pricing is on a yearly basis."
"My company pays for the Vectra AI licensing fee yearly. I know the figure because my company recently renewed the license, and it's okay, at least for the financial sector."
"The pricing is very good. It's less expensive than many of the tools out there."
"Vectra AI's pricing is cheaper than that of Darktrace."
"It is an expensive solution, but it's not the most expensive we've seen. We also know how much we're going to pay, unlike with some other providers where all of a sudden our license explodes."
"The pricing is high."
"The solution is low-cost and affordable."
"Vectra's licensing model could scale to our research network, which has multiple, 100-gigabit links."
"It's relatively on the pricier side, but when compared to other solutions. It's not the most budget-friendly option, but it can be considered somewhat more cost-effective in comparison to other alternatives."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Illumio Adaptive Security Platform?
The features that I have found most useful is the ability to centralize all the rules and then distribute them across various locations. However, I've encountered challenges related to tagging poli...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Illumio Adaptive Security Platform?
I do not have specific knowledge about pricing details as it is handled by upper management. I know that Illumio is the cheapest solution in the security area.
What needs improvement with Illumio Adaptive Security Platform?
There should be an option to upgrade from the console to the latest version instead of performing manual upgrades. This would be more helpful to streamline processes.
What is the biggest difference between Corelight and Vectra AI?
The two platforms take a fundamentally different approach to NDR. Corelight is limited to use cases that require the eventual forwarding of events and parsed data logs to a security team’s SIEM or ...
What do you like most about Vectra AI?
The solution is currently used as a central threat detection and response system.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Vectra AI?
It is very acceptable when you compare it with Darktrace, for example.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Illumio Adaptive Security Platform, Illumio ASP
Vectra Networks, Vectra AI NDR
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Plantronics, NTT Innovation Institute Inc.
Tribune Media Group, Barry University, Aruba Networks, Good Technology, Riverbed, Santa Clara University, Securities Exchange, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association
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