Vectra AI Reviews

One of the reasons we went with this solution was because there is less that we have to customize; it's more commercial off the shelf. Therefore, my team can spend their time doing what's most beneficial for the university, which is protecting it, not upgrading custom software.

We use it to inspect and look for malicious, abusive, or other types of forbidden behavior with our north-south and east-west traffic. We not only look at traffic from our campus to the Internet, but we look at traffic internally in our network as it does network AI. It not only looks when a specific event happens, but whether, "Is this a normal event? Or is it normal for the host to do that?" 

The Privileged Account Analytics for detecting issues with privileged accounts is very important because, like any organization, we have people from low-privileged, regular users all the way to administrators who have very high levels of privilege. Therefore, a regular student, on their own machine, may run Coinminer on it, which might be something that the student is experimenting with for higher ed. However, it's a very different use case when a staff user on their work issued machine is running it. Cognito will let us discover that very easily and contextualize it, "Is this really the criticality of an alert or a behavior?" It does this not only for the user, but it also lets us see through the DNS and machine name, whether it's a university asset, etc. Also, you can target those users who have a very high level of access by really enriching your analysis of alerts, such as, "I know that this administrative account does do PowerShell stuff because that's one of the main jobs of that sysadmin." Then, if I see that sort of PowerShell behavior from another account that I wouldn't expect it from, then that's a reason for concern.

The solution captures network metadata at scale and enriches it with security information. This provides us context upfront which helps us prioritize.

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.

The solution’s ability to reduce false positives and help us focus on the highest-risk threats is very good. The additional context and ability to take other factors that we can feed into it, like our threat intelligence feed or the user identity, helps with running down whether behaviors are legitimate or pose a big risk. It also helps us eliminate false positives where appropriate, such as some of our system admins running PowerShell in a way that looks very suspicious if you saw it from a regular user.

It has reduced the type of analysis needed to run down and get to the bottom of what's really happening. On the flip side, it doesn't miss as much as a human only or more signature oriented approach would. While I don't want to give a false impression that it's going to result in less work, I think the work that we're doing is more efficient. We can do a lot more to protect, because we're able to react and look at what's important. It may not directly translate into, "Oh, well we spend less time on threat hunting and investigating a suspicious behavior," but we're seeing what we need to look at more effectively.

It's easier to get an analyst up to speed and be effective. The solution has helped move approximately 25 percent of the work from our Tier 2 to Tier 1 analysts.

I find the network artificial intelligence and machine learning to be most valuable because we have also significantly increased the amount of traffic that we inspect. This has kind of lowered the burden of creating ways to drink from that fire hose of data. The artificial intelligence and machine learning help bubble up to the top things that we should go look at which are real deviations from the norm.

I would assess the solution’s ability to reduce alerts by rolling up numerous alerts to create a single incident or campaign for investigation very highly. Rather than relying on signatures and a human to look if, "Host X has hit these four different signatures," which is probably an indicator of a fairly high confidence that something's not right, the analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning in this product tie those events together. It also looks for new events that are out of the ordinary, then gathers those together and tells us to look at specific hosts. This is rather than an analyst having to sift through a bunch of signature hits, and say, "Oh, this host needs to be looked at."

Also, there is a much lower operational burden of maintenance. We used to use open source monitoring tools, which are very good, but they take a lot of work to maintain and leverage. We really like the commercial off the shelf type of approach of the software, not brewing our own.

Some of their integrations with other sources of data, like external threat feeds, took a bit more work than I had hoped to get integrated. I think the company has been very responsive, willing to take our feedback, and look at addressing our concerns.

I have asked that they give direct packets capabilities.

About a year and a half.

It is very stable and easy to maintain compared to the Linux open source solution that we previously used for a long time.

Maintaining the solution isn't even a full FTE, probably more like a quarter. We have to coordinate if we want to get more data into it, as there are some integrations that we do with our threat intelligence feed from our ISAC.

We have talked to several other customers who have much larger environments than ours, so it is very scalable. We have applied it in excess of probably 20,000 devices. We have probably 50,000 to 60,000 active users who might see traffic from it. We have hundreds of thousands in our directory total, but some of those are alumni or adjunct faculty, so they may not be active all the time. We have on order of 700 servers and hundreds of applications. We're not huge, but we're not tiny.

One of the things that is really exciting about partnering with Vectra is they have solutions for the cloud, both Azure and AWS. This will get us that same type of visibility we're getting now with things on our physical campus using cloud services. This is probably where our increased usage will be concentrated on.

Vectra's technical support is very good.

We switched from an open source solution to Cognito because there was a lower operational maintenance burden and it provided more visibility into our environment. It also has more analysis and initial triage done by the network AI and machine learning.

Vectra enables us to answer investigate questions faster than our open source solutions previously did.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Our initial deployment with north-south and a bit of east-west for our first virtual sensor probably took two to three days at most. 

Long-term, we now have it deployed on every VMware server that is in our environment and it's monitoring probably 500 to 600 inter-server communications (between different servers). That took a little longer because we had to first work with our colleagues here onsite. It wasn't an issue with Vectra. It just took time and we had to arrange some work with internal partners. We did the reference and first setup in a day.

For our implementation strategy, we turned up north-south visibility immediately and brought up a single virtual sensor for our VMware environment. Then, after three months, we revisited it with a team who operates VMware and their servers. We made sure they were comfortable with the resource demands and how well the solution was working. Finally, we were able to have them turn it on for all the VMware servers.

We had very knowledgeable people from the vendor work with our networking group to get the correct traffic to its sensors. This was done remotely/virtually, but it was done very well.

Hopefully, this is a sunk cost. We are mitigating risk. We are not expecting to make money on this solution.

The solution has reduced the time it takes us to respond to attacks by approximately 20 percent.

We looked at some of Vectra's competitors. We had Snort and also used Bro. We also used Argus and NetFlow collector. Therefore, we looked at what were the products out there that could sort of replicate the things we were doing with a commercial off the shelf product that had artificial intelligence, but not open source.

We looked at Corelight, which was more grow only. We also looked at ExtraHop.

We didn't do a formal RFP with this one. We developed some relationships with the management at Vectra, who really wanted to partner with us. We looked at their technology and other competitors in the area, then decided it was a worthwhile (based on their commitment) for us to work with them.

Usually, I'll go to the Gartner Security & Risk Summits and look around at what different vendors are coming out with. That's a very useful venue for learning about new vendors.

We don't have that big of a cloud presence yet. However, the solution would correlate behaviors in our enterprise network and data centers with behaviors we see in our cloud environment because part of our east-west visibility includes our dedicated connections to cloud instances. If it goes over to our commodity Internet, it should see it there too.

I would rate this solution as an eight point five (out of 10).

All opinions in this review are my own.

As a sector, the education industry as a whole is under threat with quite a large volume of immediate threat offenders. We've seen numerous attacks coming through brute force or DDoS. The amount of ransomware and phishing attacks is on the rise compared to that of five years ago, for instance. I see regular threat campaigns from numerous actors around the world.

Our main use case is to have Vectra AI as an addition to our security team. We have a large campus with 1,100 boarding students and about 600 staff on top of that. However, my security team only comprises myself and one other person.

Being able to detect security threats in real-time and, more importantly, being able to get rid of the noise is very important to me. That is, getting rid of the false positives and just focusing on the actual high threats that we see coming through is a great benefit for us.

The biggest feature for us, because we are heavy Microsoft users, is its integration with Office 365. On top of Vectra AI, we use all of the Microsoft security platforms, such as Defender ATP and Sentinel. Having full integration and a central platform to look at all of the threats that are coming through from the different platforms is a huge benefit for us.

With one nice front dashboard, we can look at the high-volume threats rather than all of the noise. We do get a lot of noise as our students all own their own devices. With Vectra AI, we can look at threats in a controlled manner, which saves us an extraordinary amount of time. Even if I doubled the manpower, I doubt that I would still have the same visibility that I have with the correct security platform.

Vectra AI's Threat Detection and Response platform has done remarkably well. We're well-versed in using the security dashboard from Microsoft Defender, and we're at the stage where we are checking both. We haven't fully switched to relying on only the Vectra dashboard yet.

In terms of Vectra AI Attack Signal Intelligence for empowering security analysts within our organization, we have complete faith in the data that's coming through from Vectra. If we could also have what's happening at the front-end, that is, the firewall, then it would give us the complete security front dashboard.

In education as a sector, we are looking at AI a lot in terms of how it can be used as part of the teaching and learning side of things. It would be great to have Vectra AI look at a better way to enhance the security posture related to the AI tools in our portfolio.

We've been using Vectra now for about eight months.

Vectra AI's stability has been 100%.

Vectra AI's integration team was spot-on. They helped us with a very well-defined and well-tested plan, and they worked with us to ensure that the product met all of our goals. Now that we're a customer, we have regular meet-ups with the team.

The technical support staff are very knowledgeable regardless of the type of questions we've had. It feels like they are more than just a support team. I feel like I can reach out to them whenever I need to because they're approachable and understand the challenges that we have within our industry. As such, I would give them a rating of ten out of ten.

Positive

Previously, we used Darktrace. Though it is a good platform, because there were so many false positives coming through, we found that we were neglecting it and not investigating the alerts. After less than a year of using Vectra, we've managed to tailor our dashboards to a point where we just see the high-volume or high-risk alerts coming through, and we act on those on an instant basis. Vectra AI has helped me get my time back. 

Vectra's pricing is too high. All schools will not be able to afford it. Vectra will only end up targeting higher education and higher value independence purely because of the price.

A lot of schools would love to have a product like Vectra AI, but they simply can't because they struggle to even pay the high E5 licensing from Microsoft. When you're up against that, Vectra AI is never going to be within the sector's price range.

We evaluated whether we wanted to switch to Vectra AI or whether we wanted to utilize just our existing Microsoft security stack.

Overall, I would rate Vectra AI an eight out of ten. I am basing my whole security portfolio and roadmap around Vectra, which means that in the future I need to get more automation, remove some of the cross-tracking that we do with the Microsoft security stack, and then become much more reliant on the data coming through from Vectra AI.

The key challenge we face is visibility, things that happen in isolated and pocketed environments where visibility is limited. Silos and isolated networks exist across the environment, and it's difficult to control it completely. Blind spots are the main challenges.

With this solution, the focus has changed from reactive to more proactive, because all the other SOAR and EDR solutions, firewalls, and IPSs are generally reactive. With those tools, when most things are triggered, it means you are already slightly late. With Vectra, we become more proactive than reactive. More often than not, we pick things up before the actual damage can start. It picks up things that none of our other tools pick up because it's designed to detect things before harm is done, at the initial stages. This is one of the main benefits and the biggest business justification and use case for us.

It reduces the time it takes to respond to attacks because we find out about a threat in the beginning so we can stop it before it can cause harm, rather than reacting when the damage is done and significantly more effort is needed.

And since it is not preventive, it does not trigger any adverse reactions. For example, sometimes we have seen, with certain kinds of malware or ransomware, that they tend to get more aggressive if they realize that something is stopping them, but that doesn't happen with detection tools like Vectra.

For capturing network metadata at scale and enriching it with security information, that's where the second product comes in, Cognito Recall. It takes enriched network metadata and keeps that information available for you to access, whether it triggers a detection or not. For example, if you want to check who is using SSL version 3, TLS version 1.0, SNMP version 1, SNMP version 2, or who is using clear text passwords, even though they don't trigger a detection in Cognito Detect, that metadata is available. Of course, the duration of that data is dependent on how much storage we can buy from Vectra. That's a financial constraint and we have opted for one month. We might look at expanding that further.

That metadata helps in closing vulnerabilities. For instance, if there is a TLS version or an encryption level that we want to deprecate, it is very useful for us, because we can also generate reports. We know which systems are using SNMP version 1 or SNMP version 2. Even though it has more features and you can create custom detections through Recall, we've not gone that far. For us, this has been our most common use case: protocols and communications that we would like to stop or close. This provides useful data.

The solution also provides visibility into behaviors across the full lifecycle of an attack, beyond just the internet gateway. It provides the whole MITRE Framework and the key chain—recon, command and control. It has detections under each of those categories, and it picks them up within the network. In fact, most of the detections are internal. Internet-based detections comprise 25 to 30 percent, and those are based on encrypted traffic. And most of the time when we validate, we see that it's genuine because it's a call from a support vendor where large files need to be uploaded. That gives us an opportunity to validate with that end-user as well: What was happening, what did you transfer?

We used to have SIEM and antivirus solutions and we would get a lot of alerts. Those alerts resulted in a lot of effort to refine them and yet we still needed a lot of effort to analyze the information. Vectra does all of that automatically for us, and what it produces, in the end, is something that can easily be done by one person. In fact, you don't even need one.

The most useful feature is the anomaly detection because it's not signature-based. It picks up the initial part of any attack, like the recon and those aspects of the kill chain, very well. We've had numerous red team and penetration exercises and, at the initial stage, when the recon is happening and credentials are used and lateral movement is attempted, our existing tools don't pick it up because it has not yet been "transformed" into something malicious. But Vectra, at that stage, picks it up 80 to 90 percent of the time. That has been one of the biggest benefits because it picks up what other things don't see, and it picks them up at the beginning when attackers are trying to do something rather than when the damage is already done.

The ability to roll up numerous alerts to create a single incident or campaign for investigation takes a bit of effort in the beginning because you'll always have misconfigurations, such as wrong passwords, that could trigger brute force and SMB-types of alerts. And you'll have genuine behaviors in your environment that tend to be suspicious, such as vulnerability assessment and scanning tools, that are not noise, per se. Even if they're non-malicious, it always tends to point to events like misconfigurations and security tools. It's been very useful in that sense, in that, once we do the initial triaging, indicating that this is a security tool, or that is a misconfiguration we need to correct, it reduces the noise quite significantly. We don't get more than 10 to 20 events, maximum, generated per day.

Vectra shows what it does in terms of noise reduction, and we can see that it is down to only 1 percent, and sometimes even less than 1 percent, of what actually requires a person to act on.

It becomes quite easy for a SOC analyst to handle things without being overburdened. And, obviously, it's at the initial stage because it picks things up before the damage happens. It's not the kind of prevention tool that has signatures and that only tells you something bad has already happened. It tells you that something is not right or is suspicious. It says there is a behavior that we have not seen before, and it has always been effective in the red team exercises that we periodically conduct.

Also, we have privileged account management, but we don't have a separate analytics tool. Still, Vectra also picks that up. This is also something that has come up during red team exercises. If there's an account that is executing an escalated privilege or running a service that it normally doesn't run, it gets flagged. It tells us about lateral movements and privilege escalations; things that constitute non-standard usage. It's quite effective at catching these. I have yet to see a red team exercise that doesn't generate any alerts in Vectra. We see a jump, and it's very easy to identify the account and the system that is the source.

It also triages threats and correlates them with the compromised host devices, because it maps both ways. It maps the host, the account, and the detection, and vice versa. You can also go to the detection and see how many affected hosts there are. In addition, if there's a particular detection, is there an existing campaign? How many hosts are also doing the same thing? These are the kinds of visibility the tool provides.

The reporting from Cognito Detect is very limited and doesn't give you too many options. If I want to prepare a customized report on a particular host, even though I see the data, I have to manually prepare the report. The reporting features that are built into the tool are not very helpful. They are very generic and broad. That's one main area that I keep telling Vectra they need to improve. 

Also, whenever there's a software upgrade and new detections are introduced and the intelligence improves, there is a short period at the beginning where there's a lot of noise. Suddenly, you will get a burst of detections because it's a new detection. It's a new type of intelligence they've introduced and it takes some time to learn. We get worried and we always check whether an upgrade has happened. Then we say, "Okay, that must be the reason." I would like to see an improvement wherein, whenever they do an upgrade, that transition is a bit smoother. It doesn't happen all the time, but sometimes an upgrade triggers noise for some time until it settles down.

We've been using the Vectra AI for over three years.

In the beginning, there is a struggle to fine-tune it because it will generate noise for the reasons I mentioned. But once that learning phase is complete, it's quite reliable. We have been using the hardware for more than three years and there have been no failures or RMAs

Upgrades happen automatically. We have never gone into the appliance to do an upgrade, even though it's on-prem. It all happens automatically and seamlessly in the background. 

Initially, we had some problems with the Recall connection to the cloud, to establish the storage connectivity. But again, these kinds of things are at the beginning. After that, it is quite stable. We've not had any problems.

Scalability for the cloud solution is straightforward. For the on-prem solution, you need to take care of the capacity and the function itself, because the capacity of the same hardware varies, depending on what you use it for. From a capacity point of view, there is some effort required in the design.

Looking forward to the future, the tool integrates with more and more solutions outside of its existing intelligence. It's not something that we have yet embarked on, but that's an interesting area in which we would like to invest some time.

The cloud solution is something that has limited visibility because PaaS and SaaS in the cloud are always a challenge in terms of cyber security. And in the future, even though we have taken the Vectra SaaS for O365, they're also coming up with a PaaS visibility tool. It is currently under testing, and we are one of the users that have been chosen to participate in the beta testing of that. That's another thing in the future that would add a lot of value in terms of visibility.

Currently, we have about 8,000 users.

The support is directly from the device or we get a response via email. The response is okay. Because the product is stable, we have not been in a situation where we urgently needed something and we wanted support right now. We have never tested that kind of fast response. They take some time to respond, but whenever we have requested something, it has not been urgent. 

We do get a response and issues always get resolved. We haven't had any lingering issues. They have all been closed.

Positive

We did not have any tools in the same league. We had security tools, but not with anomaly detection as part of the feature set.

Cognito Detect is on-prem and Cognito Recall is in the cloud, as is the O365 and Azure AD protection.

The cloud setup is extremely simple. The on-prem takes some effort. There is the sizing, depending on what model. The throughput varies. Those kinds of on-prem design considerations create a bit of complexity in the beginning, but the cloud is straightforward. All it needs is the requisite access to the tenant. Once it gets that, it starts its work. 

In the beginning, there is some effort in fine-tuning things, but that comes as part of the package with the solution. They have a success manager and tech analyst assigned to support you in the beginning. Once that is done, the product is very stable.

For us, there were an initial four to eight weeks of triaging and clearing the noise, in terms of misconfiguration issues or known security tools. After that time, we started seeing value.

We only used the people from Vectra.

Vectra is a bit on the higher side in terms of price, but they have always been transparent. The reason that they are this good is that they invest, so they need to charge accordingly. They are above average when it comes to price. They're not very economical but it's for a good reason. As long as we get quality, we are okay with paying the extra amount.

We did a PoC with Darktrace recently as part of our regular exercise of giving other solutions an opportunity, but the PoC didn't meet our requirements. It didn't detect what Vectra detects in a red team situation.

The deployment time is similar because they all need the same thing. They need the network feed for a copy of the network traffic. The base requirements are the same.

My advice is that you need to size it right and identify what your capacity will be. And you need to place it right, because it's as helpful as what it can see, so you need to have an environment that supports that. What we did, as part of implementing Vectra, was implement an effective packet broker solution in our environment. It needs that support system to function properly. It needs copies of your traffic for detection because it doesn't have an agent sitting anywhere. The positioning and packet brokering are critical allies for this solution.

We have it deployed on-premises. However, we are in the process of acquiring O365 and Azure AD as well. When it comes to Power Automate and other deeper anomalies, these are things that we have on the cloud in Azure. In the new module, it lets us know if any automation, scripts, or large, sudden downloads, or access from a country that is different from where the user has normally been, are happening. But this is a very new tool. We are yet to familiarize ourselves with it and do the fine-tuning. We don't have any automation or any such functions happening on-prem.

In terms of correlating behaviors in the enterprise network and data centers with behaviors in the cloud environment, because we have taken the O365 module, it gives us good correlation between an on-prem user and his behavior in the cloud. We have seen that sometimes it detects that an account is disabled, for example, on-prem, and it says somebody downloaded a lot of data just a few days before that or uploaded large data a few days before that. It does those kinds of correlations.

We have one SOC but it's based overseas. It's an offsite managed service and it covers the gambit of incident detection and response. It's an always-available service. The SIEM we are using is RSA NetWitness, and the EDR solution we use is McAfee.

Vectra has some automation features, in the sense of taking action through the firewalls or other integrations, but that's a journey that we have not yet embarked on. As long as we have a continuously available SOC that rapidly responds to the alerts it generates, we are okay. In general, I'm not comfortable with the automation part. Accurate detection is more important for me. Prevention, when something is picked up too late, as is the case with some of the other solutions I mentioned, is a different case. But here, when it is at the preliminary stage, prevention seems a bit too harsh.

The original use case was because we had some legacy stuff that doesn't do encryption at rest. Compliancy-wise, we had to put in some additional mitigating actions to protect it. That was the start of it. Then, we extended it to check other devices/servers within our network as well.

We are on the latest version.

It is doing some artificial intelligence. If it sees a server doing a lot of things, then it will assume that is normal. So, it is looking for anomalous behavior, things that are out of context which helps us reduce time. Therefore, we don't have to look in all the logs. We just wait for Vectra to say, "This one is behaving strange," then we can investigate that part.

We have implemented it fully now. We have done some training and filtering on it. Now, every alert that we see means that we need to investigate. It sees roughly 300 events a day. The majority are normal behavior for our company. So, there are about 10 to 15 events a day that we need to investigate.

The solution triages threats and correlates them with compromised host devices. It looks at a certain IP address, and if you're doing something strange, then it will give us an alert. E.g., normally John Doe is logged into it for four days, going to server XYZ. If all of a sudden, it's in a different timescale, going to server B, then it will send us an alert.

We have privileged accounts. They have a specific names, and if I see those names, then I investigate a bit more thoroughly. That's our policy. I don't know whether Vectra does anything different with them.

The solution gives us more tickets. If we did not have Vectra, we wouldn't have those tickets. So, it's actually increasing them. However, it is improving our security with a minimum amount of work. That's the whole purpose of the device. We have 10 to 15 events that we need to look into a day, and that is doable.

The solution creates more work for us, but it is work that we are supposed to do. We need more FTEs because we need more security.

We mainly use it for the detection types, checking dark IPS or command-and-control traffic. 

We bought Recall so we can have more information. Recall is an addition onto Vectra. We haven't enabled Recall yet, but we will. So, if there is an incident, we can investigate it a bit further with Vectra devices before going into other tools and servers. This gives us the metadata for network traffic. So, if we have a detection, we can check with Recall what other traffic we are seeing from that device, if there is anything else. It's mainly a quick and dirty way of looking at it and getting some extra information to see whether it's malicious.

We found that the solution captures network metadata at scale and enriches it with security information. This is one of the reasons why we added Recall, so the alert gives us information on where we need to look, then we can investigate a bit further. For example, a certain device is sending data to command-and-control server, then we can investigate whether that is really happening or just a false alarm with the metadata in Recall. It makes it easier to find out.

We would like to see more information with the syslogs. The syslogs that they send to our SIEM are a bit short compared to what you can see. It would be helpful if they send us more data that we can incorporate into our SIEM, then can correlate with other events. We have mentioned this to Vectra.

It does some things that I find strange, which might be the artificial intelligence. E.g., sometimes you have a username for a device, then it makes another. It detects the same device with another name, and that's strange behavior. This is one of the things that we have with Vectra support at the moment, because the solution is seeing the device twice. 

We started the pilot roughly a year ago. So, we started small with a pilot on part of the systems, then with two other vendors. Afterwards, we decided to buy it.

Now, it's almost in production. It's still a project in the end phase, as we are still implementing it. But, most of it has been running for a year.

So far, the stability has been good. There are no issues. It's never been down. It has been updating automatically on a regular basis and there are no issues with that where it has stopped working.

One person will be responsible for the deployment, maintenance, and physical upkeep; a person from the service delivery team will keep the device up and running. The security analysts (my team) deal with the alerts and filtering.

The part that we designed is not really scalable. They have options, and there is some room for improvement. If we need to scale up, which we have no intention of doing, then the physical devices need to be swapped over for a bigger one. Other than that, we have some leeway. This came up in the design with, "What are your requirements?" and those requirements have been met, so that's fine. They will probably be met for the foreseeable future.

At the moment, we don't have Tier 1 and Tier 2. Instead, we have a small team who does everything. I am mostly using it. There will be three security analysts. Then, we have a number of information security officers (ISOs) who will have a read-only role, where they can see alerts to keep an eye on them, if they want, and be able to view the logging and see if they need more information. But, there are three people who will be working with Vectra alerts.

We are in contact with the Vectra service desk. If you send them ideas, they talk about them and see if they can incorporate them.

We decided that we wanted to have an alert within 30 minutes, which is doable with this solution. It fulfills our needs. However, we didn't have this before, so it has increased our time, but for things we need to do.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward. They have security on a high level. There are a lot of logins with passwords and very long passwords. This made it go a bit longer. However, the implementation is relatively easy compared to other devices.

We made a design. That's what we implemented.

Initially, it was set up in conjunction with Vectra. When we put it into production, the majority was done by me, then checked by a Vectra engineer. If I had issues, I just contacted Vectra support and they guided me through the rest of it.

The Vectra team is nice and helpful. The service desk is fast. They know what they are doing, so I have no complaints on that part. We have a customer service person who knows about our environment and can ask in-depth questions. He came over as well for the implementation to check it, and that was fine. The work was well done.

The solution has reduced the time it takes us to respond to attacks. It sends an email to our SIEM solution. From that SIEM solution, we get emails and tickets. Therefore, the time between an alert coming up and a ticket is reduced. This is for tickets that we monitor regularly. Within 15 to 20 minutes, it gives us an alert for the things that we want. Thus, it has greatly reduced our measurable baseline.

The return of investment is we have tested it so sometimes we have auditors who do pen tests and see them. That's the goal. It seems to be working. We haven't found any actual hackers yet, so I'm not completely a 100 percent certain. However, we found auditors who are trying to do pen tests, which essentially the same thing.

The license is based on the concurrent IP addresses that it's investigating. We have 9,800 to 10,000 IP addresses. 

There are additional features that can be purchased in addition to the standard licensing fee, such as Cognito Recall and Stream. We have purchased these, but have not implemented them yet. They are part of the licensing agreement.

We investigated Darktrace, Vectra, and Cisco Stealthwatch.

Darktrace and Vectra plus Recall were similar in my opinion. Darktrace was a bit more expensive and complex. Vectra has a very nice, clean web GUI. It easier to understand and cheaper, which is one of the main reasons why we chose Vectra over Darktrace.

Darktrace and Vectra are very different, but eventually for what we wanted it to do, they almost did the same thing. Because Darktrace was a bit more expensive, it was a financial decision in the end.

I did the comparison between Darktrace and Vectra. They did almost the same thing. Sometimes, there are differences that Darktrace did detect and Vectra didn't. For the majority, we didn't find any actual hackers. So, it's all false positives, eventually. Both of them are very similar. The big thing is the hacker activity. They both detected it in the same way. But, in the details, they were different.

The options for Stealthwatch were a bit limited in our opinion for what we wanted it to do. Stealthwatch is network data, and that's it.

Start small and simple. Work with the Vectra support team.

The solution’s ability to reduce false positives and help us focus on the highest-risk threats is the tricky part because we are still doing the filtering. The things it sees are out of the ordinary and anomalous. In our company, we have a lot of anomalous behavior, so it's not the tool. Vectra is doing what it's supposed to do, but we need to figure out whether that anomalous behavior is normal for our company. 

The majority of the findings are misconfigurations of servers and applications. That's the majority of things that I'm investigating at the moment. These are not security risks, but need to be addressed. We have more of those than I expected, which is good, but not part of my job. While it's good that Vectra detects misconfiguratons, there are not our primary goal.

The solution is an eight (out of 10). 

We don't investigate our cloud at the moment.

We use it as our internal network monitoring solution.

It's interesting to consider how it has helped our organization because it's a security product. But the way it has helped is that nothing has gone wrong. And it has certainly enhanced our internal security capabilities.

Vectra has helped accelerate our threat investigations, providing us with real-time visibility of potential threats to the network that we can act upon or triage accordingly. Prior to the implementation of Vectra, we didn't have that visibility. We had a number of disparate security tools, each with its own alerting functionality. Vectra has significantly helped with a consolidated view of potential threats. And the prioritization of threats allows us to focus specifically on those threats that we believe present the greatest risk and to react to those threats extremely quickly.

Vectra MDR is also very important for us, given the relatively small size of our internal team, and it gives us 24/7 capability that we didn't have before we used Vectra's MDR service.

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. In the grand scheme of things, we're a relatively small organization with approximately 1,000 users and a small internal security team. Compared with some of its competitors, Vectra is a really easy system to understand and use to prioritize where we need to focus our security resources.

We use Microsoft 365 and Vectra extends our ability to track attacker activity, whether that happens on-premises, in a data center, or in a SaaS environment. It provides complete coverage and visibility across our ICT estate. That was a real positive when we were going through the selection process. The simplicity of the dashboard and the categorization of alerts as low, medium, high, or critical, presents us with the potential of a security risk. We can then choose to investigate it, regardless of whether it's an on-premises or cloud-security risk. They are presented in the single-pane-of-glass dashboard, and that allows us to take the appropriate action. The detection and prioritization of attacker behaviors are extremely important.

A blind spot that I have is around the ease with which you can automate threat intervention.

We've been using Vectra AI for approximately 12 months.

It seems to be extremely stable. We've not had any issues in that respect.

Vectra has visibility across our entire ICT network, which is a combination of on-premises and cloud environments. Our cloud solution is Azure, and it extends to about 1,000 users. The vast majority of them are now remote or mobile workers.

It has comfortably managed the needs of our organization and I don't have any concerns if we were to need, at some point in the future, to either scale or switch the current balance between on-prem and cloud.

We are very satisfied with the support. It has been excellent so far. It has been very timely, very personalized, and always quick to find solutions. We've been really pleased with it.

Positive

We didn't have a previous solution. We have no internal networking monitoring capability.

We started with a proof of concept and then we committed to the Vectra solution. That's when we began the formal implementation. From the very initial engagement to the proof concept and through the transition to service, it took approximately six months.

The deployment went very well and that was a real positive in terms of the engagement with the onboarding and the customer experience.

Across our ICT team, six individuals were involved in security, infrastructure, project management, and service transition.

There is no maintenance of the solution on our side.

The implementation was supported directly by Vectra UK itself.

The return on investment from the product comes from not incurring unplanned costs because of a security incident.

The upfront pricing model that we have would have been more beneficial if it had been a recurring license fee, but that wasn't a massive issue for us. It's fairly priced.

We evaluated other options very thoroughly. It became a two-horse race between Vectra and Darktrace. The differentiators for us were the UI experience, the MDR, and we felt that there was better engagement with the Vectra presales team. They better understood our needs and how Vectra would fit as a solution.

The percentage of critical alerts from Vectra that are critical or true positives, to be fair, is relatively small, probably about 10 percent, but that's more a reflection of the fact that we're still a relatively new client and that the system is still learning. What we have noticed though is that the triage process is effective and we don't get multiple false negatives once we've identified an issue.

We bought Vectra AI through our IT partner, which is CDW. They were only involved in the procurement process. We used a partner to ensure that we could demonstrate that we had done so according to compliance.

I would definitely recommend Vectra and to do a proof of concept. We learned quite a lot through that proof-of-concept process. Those lessons certainly helped us when we went into the implementation process and to engage internal ICT team stakeholders and anticipate central issues in the implementation process. A proof of concept would be invaluable for anybody thinking about implementing this or one of the competitive solutions.

At the moment, we're really pleased with the product and it's a really good fit for the size of our organization.

We wanted something to understand what's happening on the network of the company, and we wanted something to protect us against attacks and cyber activities. We wanted visibility into our network and all the threats that we're facing.

It has helped improve our mean time to identify, but I don't have the metrics on time savings because we didn't have anything for that previously.

It hasn't had any effect on the productivity of our organization’s SOC, but it has had a great effect on security.

In terms of the effect of Vectra AI Attack Signal Intelligence for empowering security analysts within our organization to take intelligent action, we are looking at the right risks and nothing more. We save some time for sure, and we empower our security with it. Previously, we couldn't see anything, but now, we are seeing some of the things, and we have already stopped some attacks with it.

The automatic filtering that they provide is valuable. The logic inside that makes some detections instead of us is very useful. We are confident that if we are just looking into it and there is nothing, nothing could happen. That's great.

It's simple to implement. It's simple to analyze. The dashboard is very smart and clean. It's very easy to check something. There are a lot of tools to analyze the detections. It's great.

We got two problems that couldn't be solved because of the philosophy of the product. We are using SMB 3.0, which is an encrypted protocol. When we get some alerts or something, we cannot go deep into the protocol to see what's wrong because it's encrypted. We need to decrypt the protocol in another way, which is quite difficult. We might go back to SMB 2.0 just for this reason, but that's not a good solution.

We did some penetration tests and tried to get some hashes or encrypted passwords from Active Directory. Those hashes didn't provide alerts into Vectra. Vectra doesn't survey them, which is quite problematic because it's a very common attack. They said that it's not the only aspect that would come with that kind of attack, but when somebody tries to get a lot of hashes, we would like that there is an alert because that seems like the start of an attack.

For the hashes issue, it could be very easy for them to make the improvement. They can just change a rule, and that's it, but for encrypted protocols, it could be trickier.

We have been using this solution for two to three years.

There is no problem with stability. Sometimes, alerts can come later. For example, for Office 365, we got the alert one day late, but the problem was coming from the Microsoft side.

We just have one, and that's enough for our needs. Its scalability is good for us because we just have one with multiple probes at the same cost, so that's fine for us.

Their support is very good. They have knowledgeable people with great knowledge of cyber security and cyber risks. I'd rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

We weren't using any solution before. We went for Vectra AI because we wanted something to have visibility. We were completely blind to what could happen on the network. With Vectra AI, we aren't so blind.

We stopped some attacks. An attack could cost a lot more than the cost of Vectra. For example, we got an attack before that cost us $100,000. So, Vectra's cost is not so high. The cost of an attack could be worse. If we got encrypted data, it could be worse because we would have to stop the factory, which would cost a lot.

Its cost is too much. It's an investment that we can afford. It's a lot, but it's worth it.

We evaluated Darktrace and one more solution. We also evaluated some SOC and SIEM systems, but we found Vectra AI to be better in comparison to other solutions. It was simple to implement and analyze.

I'd rate Vectra AI a 10 out of 10.

Our Customers use Vectra AI to detect networks, endpoints, identities, SaaS-based, and private and public clouds.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it only shows us the events that are actually critical. The solution is currently used as a central threat detection and response system. It ingests every bit of information from the SIEM, does AI triaging and detection, and sends incredibly high-fidelity alerts to the SIEM for investigation.

It would be commercially beneficial if Vectra AI had something like Darktrace's Antigena Email or something similar to email protection. 

I have been assisting customers using Vectra AI for nine months.

Vectra AI provides 100% stability because it sends you either a physical box or a VMware deployment, making it very simple and stable. Obviously, VMware will depend on your own environment.

Vectra AI is a scalable solution. Since we have added distribution levels, we've made quite a few deployments. The solution can support up to 1,00,000 endpoints. There's a specific customer that's using Vectra AI and has over 1,00,000 endpoints.

The solution’s technical support team is quite competent.

Positive

Vectra AI's initial setup is very simple. The Vectra AI team is quite competent, and they support and help us set everything up.

The solution's deployment was fairly quick. We had everything up and running within a day. Then, it was just about the information they were putting out that was being collected.

Vectra AI has an annual subscription license. You could choose the components you need for your environment. 

The solution had some very good integrations with firewalls and EDR solutions. Since Vectra AI is more of an internally-detection and response tool, it detects insider threats extremely well.

Before choosing Vectra AI, ensure you have a proper architect for your environment that shows you where all your blindspots could be. This makes the deployment a lot easier. Vectra AI detects threats that people miss, especially manual operators.

Vectra AI has helped save a lot of log analysts time because they don't have to deal with a lot of alert noise and false positives. Using Vectra AI for detection, triaging, and responses speeds up your soft response mechanism and makes the responses much quicker.

Overall, I rate the solution an nine out of ten.

This tool operates on machine learning principles, utilizing its own AI-based models and rules to detect activity within your environment. Initially, Vectra AI observes and monitors your organization's behavior for a two-week period, identifying legitimate services operating within your environment. Once it completes this monitoring phase and detects all services, it begins to assign certainty and severity levels to the network traffic it observes.

Vectra AI offers a range of valuable features. Firstly, it utilizes its own AI-based tools. Secondly, it provides various dashboards that facilitate the identification of connections and can detect data exfiltration, meaning data sent from your environment to another. The tool operates based on metadata, offering comprehensive information about traffic between source and destination. Some key features include the ability to integrate with EDR or EPP solutions, allowing you to secure servers with stability issues or infections. Alternatively, you can use Active Directory to lock down infected hosts if you choose not to incorporate EPP or EDR. These features provide insights into your network, showing connection details, data transfers, VPN connections, and the number of connected EDS event hosts, among other things.             

One area where there's room for improvement is the absence of a comprehensive TCP recording and replay feature. While there is an alternative method available, it doesn't provide the same functionality in a graphical interface.

I have been using Vectra AI for the past 12 months. 

In terms of stability, I've been using it for the past month, and I haven't encountered any significant issues or downtime. Based on this one-month experience, I would rate its stability as a seven out of ten.

Scalability is excellent and I would rate it a 10 out of 10. Expanding the sensor capacity is relatively straightforward. However, it's crucial to plan for scalability during deployment. If an organization anticipates significant traffic, they should choose a brain that can handle it. Selecting a smaller brain initially and then attempting to expand later may lead to challenges. The scalability largely depends on the organization's needs and Vectra's ability to accommodate them.

From what I've heard, the support team is responsive and helpful. However, I haven't had the opportunity to directly interact with the technical support team.

Positive

The on-prem setup requirement is something easy. However, the cloud's environment setup is a bit tricky and complex. Not only because of the Vectra but also due to the some limitations of the cloud setup. The deployment process varies depending on the organization's size and footprint. It typically takes about one week for data centers with a dispersed network across different regions. For Vectra, on-premises deployment is relatively straightforward, but the cloud deployment can be more complex.

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.

I would rate it a seven.

I would advise other organizations using Vectra to ensure they fine-tune their service groups, correctly label their services, and integrate their firewalls and AWS systems. This will help obtain accurate and updated information about DMZ tools, VPN tools, and EC2 tools, allowing Vectra to have better visibility into the services running. This, in turn, can improve the accuracy of the scan feed and provide more precise results, reducing false positives.

Overall, I would rate it seven out of ten.