VMware Carbon Black Endpoint Reviews

The solution is primarily used for protection. It's used on all of our servers and all of our workstations.

The product has considerably decreased any of our malware or malicious software injection within our organization. Since March of 2018, we have not had a malicious intrusion success. It's kept us quite safe.

The solution's most valuable aspect is its process monitoring due to the fact that it doesn't necessarily use signature-based definitions. It uses processor-based definitions. If a process tries to spawn some type of malicious process, it'll stop it.

The initial setup is easy.

The organization has to protect against users and Carbon Black does just that for the company. What I mean by that is not all users are savvy enough to understand, "Hey, I shouldn't be running this or I get a pop-up on a browser and I don't click on it." Carbon Black stops that if they do.

The solution is extremely scalable.

The alerting mail needs to be customizable. Right now, it isn't. That has to change. Right now, I get a lot of what I call noise email alerts. All I hear from them is, "Well, we're working on it. We're working on it." Well, they've been working on it for four years now, and nothing has changed.

In the past, we've seen some stability issues in the latest version releases. We tend to hang back one version just to make sure issues are fully resolved to avoid user disruption.

We've been using the solution since 2017. It's been a few years at this point.

The solution is generally mostly stable. We tend to try to stay one version back in order to get better stability. I've run into problems already where Carbon Black has flagged certain things in a later release that they weren't flagging previously and it disrupts my user base.

The scalability is very good. It's pretty much unlimited at this point. A company can scale however much they like with no trouble.

We have over 500 licenses. The use cases are mostly for our servers and our workstation user roles are drafters, engineers.

We use the solution enterprise-wide. I'm not going to increase usage except maybe to increase the license count if servers or workstations go up.

Their technical support is beyond compromise. They've been absolutely excellent. We're quite satisfied with their level of attention. 

We were previously using Symantec. We switched for numerous reasons. One of them was the fact that Symantec was just not catching a lot of our intrusion at that time. Again, this would have been back in 2017, and a lot of the malware that was coming out back then, the agents weren't catching as quickly. Nobody really had much sense of what zero-day attacks meant.

The initial setup is not overly complex. It's pretty straightforward.

The deployment was fast and the process took maybe two hours or so. The deployment strategy was just running the installation agent.

There really is no maintenance required. It's just as simple as re-installing or installing the agent.

We didn't need to use any integrators or consultants for the deployment. We handled everything ourselves in-house.

We noticed an ROI after about six months of working with the solution.

Previous to Carbon Black, we had a malware attack that cost us a significant amount of money. We haven't had one since, and therefore, our return on investment has been significant.

We simply auto-renew every year. I can't speak to the exact pricing. My standard license includes everything that I need without any extra costs.

I was looking at the possibility of replacing this solution with Defender, as that's part of our Office 365 licensing package that we have. I was asking myself "will this help? Is it really worth me spending x number of dollars for CBD versus using Defender?" However, after careful examination, we decided to stick with Carbon Black.

We're generally always using the latest version of the solution, minus one. What I mean by that is it's not always current, however, it's always at least within one of the most current versions. We've got too many things going on to really be on the bleeding edge if you will. At times to go up to the next one I want to be sure I have a good stable one. What I'll do is let's say 3.3 comes out next week, I won't necessarily go to it. I will wait until 3.4 comes out to go to 3.3.

While the agents are installed locally, everything basically goes through the cloud. We don't deal with on-premises deployments.

I would advise new users to be cautious or policy settings. I'd also warn them that they should be prepared for lots of emails.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

We use Carbon Black agents that are monitored by the Forescout Extended Module for CB. It will check that CB Agents are deployed and are in running state to secure containers across vmware environment.

The dashboard shows the security analyst who looks at the reports of the threats around policies monitoring Carbon Black agents. The discovery happens in Carbon Black, and as part of the discovery, it will monitor multiple Carbon Black agents. Deployment is on hybrid cloud VM cloud on AWS.

Technical support is excellent. It's also stable, scalable, and easy to implement.

In the next release, it would help if we can get better control over containers. This will help secure the containers in multiple environments. For example, we need to secure the Kubernetes containers. Apart from admin user login to see containers processes running, developers & operate team users also should be seeing the container's processes running.

I have been using Carbon Black CB Defense for the past year.

Carbon Black CB Defense is a stable product.

Carbon Black CB Defense is a scalable product.

We have extended support from the IT technical team and the engineering team from VMware. Their support is excellent. I don't see any issue with technical support.

The initial setup and installation are straightforward. Typically it takes just two days to set up Carbon Black agents for the post cloud. A team of about 15 technical people deployed this solution.

There is a very big team from VMware, including VMware support, who implemented this solution. 

The licensing costs depend on how many policies you have on the extended module for CB. We pay between $5,000 to $7,000 for a license for the Carbon Black monitoring agents.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Carbon Black CB Defense a seven.

We have a dedicated team using this solution. They create incidents, escalate the incidents, and then respond to the events detected by the EDR.

The best feature of this solution is that we have a live response, which is really tailored to our needs. 

There is no option for the solution to block automatically based on behavior. First, the solution needs a lot of time to record all the behaviors. Then, we manually have to create a behavior analysis rule to detect any malicious activity. The solution would be improved and be more effective if there was a way for this process to be done automatically.

We have been using this solution for six to seven months. 

The solution is not always ideal, but it is pretty stable. We did face a few issues, in the response feature for example, but they were resolved.

At this point we have not encountered any issues with scalability, but time will tell how much scaling is feasible for us.

The customer support is average. At times I feel like they should have responded to us immediately because we had some issues that needed an immediate reply, but their response was a bit slow. However, overall, they're good and the support is acceptable.

Neutral

It was not easy and we faced challenges, but it was okay. We're also dealing with an issue involving multiple unsupported OS's because we have so many Linux products in our infrastructure. I would rate the initial setup as a three out of five, with one being difficult and five being easy.

This is a good solution, but there are a lot of improvements needed. I am overseeing the project part of the solution, not the deep technical side. As far as my knowledge is concerned, it's an easy-to-use solution and it has many good features, but it also has many features that require improvement. I would rate the solution as a six out of ten. 

What I like the most about it is the dynamic grouping, where you get to group endpoints based on setup criteria. That's pretty cool. I like the simplified policy management and simplified white-listing process. Coming from McAfee, management has been much simpler and much easier to look at. 

I like the simplified management, it has a nice UI, and it's very simple.

The EDR portion could be better. I'm not a big fan, but it works.

The End Point Detection Response and the way it lays our processes with our endpoint and its detection engine, in the way that it detects the admin or alerts we based on a threat. I feel that they're a little behind on the market from my perspective.  

Overall, areas of improvement would be the EDR part, the detection, also the cloud console. If you're trying to write queries or something, it's very slow, just not robust.

It's a cloud console so it should be fast. If I run a query and I press enter, if it took two seconds, it wouldn't give me a nice loading interface, because it's stuck. I would see an operating system most of the time. 

I feel like it should be faster. But as far as the price and everything, I think it's a good product.

We're actually doing a migration from McAfee to Carbon Black. The migration project has been about 12 months right now. We're slowly migrating.

Stability is one thing that's not robust. Other products are faster, but as far as the CB Defense, it's slow. We had some issues with the sensors and we also saw slowness on the Windows side, Windows file share, which actually was fixed in the next new version of the sensor.

I'm the only network security person here. But the other users who have different roles have access as well. In my team, there are five or six people. But I'm the only one actually directing changes.

We use it on a daily basis. 

There are always alerts so I'll always have to check into alerts and see what's going on and then do some more analysis. If it's a new application we are implementing that will also need to be configured on Carbon. 

The deployment process is straightforward. 

We're still deploying it slowly, little by little because we use a lot of critical applications and if Carbon Black interferes with the application, it will stop working. It needs to be tested thoroughly. It's a long process. 

All of its applications need to be tested thoroughly and then tested in a testing environment. Then we deploy and monitor, make changes, and stuff like that. As far as general users, laptops, and stuff, that's pretty straightforward. It's just part of the image. I have to write that script to uninstall McAfee, the whole migration. It's pretty straightforward. It wasn't complex as far as the installation or deployment.

There was also a technical lead for this project. It automatically comes with professional services for 10 hours and the documentation is pretty clear. The professors helped through the process. 

I think it's 28 per employee a year. 

We also looked at CrowdStrike but it was a little too expensive. 

The implementation is very easy but the security aspects could be better. 

If you don't have a SIEM solution in your organization, you're probably engaging via email.But there's no way to point me to customize the email templates if I want to see more information on that email before going to the console. It's still a business and company, but I'm the only one who is managing everything. So when I see the email on my phone, I want to see more information before logging into the console. I want to see more filtering options to narrow down more field training. 

I also wish it was easier and more intuitive in terms of searching for queries. I feel like it should be simpler. It doesn't make sense to have it this hard.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

We're providing this product to our customers. The main intention of using this product is to detect small malware and for vulnerabilities and scanning detection in real-time.

The Intel fit was very extensive and comprehensive enough. The visualization tree product feature in this CB defense is quite good. These are the two more notable product features.

The pricing is excellent.

The solution is stable.

There's some disparity between the on-premise and the cloud type of application. We basically manage applications versus SaaS-based ones. We were hoping that some of the more advanced features that they offer in the SaaS actually could be similarly offered for the on-premise managed applications. We find that cloud-based solutions are particularly more advanced in product roadmaps compared to on-prem.

There should be more roles in support. There needs to be support for multi-tenancy, the likes of multiple names space. When you use that in a very large organization, you have many departments. It doesn't really provide grouping by department, et cetera. 

There's actually a lagging feature that we saw in the SaaS, yet not on the on-premise setup. It seems like the on-premise one was really, really meant for a single department setup rather than for multiple departments.

The solution doesn't allow for high availability configuration. That's also a negative impact relating to the product.

We have been using this solution for about two years.

Stability-wise, the product has been quite stable. There's no issue. The maintenance was quite straightforward, and if you don't really touch it, you won't have stability problems. 

Medium to large companies will be selecting Carbon Black solutions mainly due to the fact that they needed this to better the security posture checks in the environment, typically in the more regulated environment. Regulatory, regulated environments or companies that are more security-centric will go for this type of product.

While it can scale, it only supports non-HA. Scalability is quite limited. You can only scale vertically - not horizontally.

Technical support can be much improved. They're quite lagged in terms of their support and post-sales. In terms of the roadmap to sell, they tend to sell more towards endpoints and very large enterprises. For a server base, it would lose itself. That's not really their main focus at this point in time. Therefore, it's not as good there.

Neutral

I'm also familiar with Trend Micro. Trend Micro is advancing the product, keeping it fairly up to date, and covering some aspects of the EDR over time and they're doing a lot of catching up. They actually have caught up. The technology now is quite fairly similar - it's just that the initial focus was in different areas, however, they are filling this gap. It's actually a very strong competitor. In terms of user, features-wise, et cetera, this solution is quite on par. Trend Micro is a security-focused company, so from an enterprise point, probably they are more focused than Carbon Black nowadays being bought over by VMware. Security is probably not their main area of focus at this point in time. 

The initial setup is a bit of a mix. It is simple in the sense the setup was quite straightforward, however, when it comes to configuring for other supports, like emails, notifications, Syslog, et cetera, this identity provider's power integration, which we did for our SML 2.0, is powered based, rather than supported directly through the GUI. That was not so user-friendly, or more complex in terms of configuration.

On a scale from one to five in terms of ease of setup, it'll be about three. It probably takes about half a day just to complete the configuration setup.

The maintenance so far has been quite fairly straightforward. We don't really have any issues with the maintenance. Obviously, I didn't want the downside of the product side, maybe one of the cons is that it doesn't really support HA high availability setup configuration. 

We have a contract, we have actually a BOT tender contract where our different customers from different departments actually purchase their licensing. Generally, the pricing is from a unique cost perspective. I wouldn't know exactly how much they buy typically, as they procure their licenses on their own. Typically, if you compared the pricing to Trend Micro, it's probably about half the cost.

We're not quite a partner. We are a systems integrator and reseller. 

We do not have the latest update. We integrate that into our Azure AD itself.

We have the solution deployed both on the cloud and on-premises. 

I'd recommend the solution based on the cost. It's really subjective to the organization's needs. If it's for a single, small department, it's fine. If it's for a large organization itself, some of it lacks. Enterprise capabilities are probably a hindrance for a large organization to take up such a product. The limitations of supporting multiple departments with different roles and users, for them to configure what they need, would be a problem. When you talk about alerts et cetera, and also certain tracks, different departments actually probably they have their own different needs, so they wanted something to be a little bit independent, where the configuration settings are unique to the department, rather than something that can only be common for all departments in the current setup.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten.

I know they have different forms in their Carbon Black Endpoint now, but we were using Carbon Black Prevent, which was basically just a pure whitelisting product. We didn't look at the other kinds of things that it was doing.

We were basically just using it for, "If Carbon Black picks up a new file in the machine and it's executable or something and it hasn't seen it before, it has to be whitelisted first. It has to be approved before it's allowed to run." That's what we're using it for.

We were technically one and a half versions behind the current version which is out there right now.

The solution is deployed on-prem.

We have cut back the amount of users. At one point, we had about 1,500 or 2,000 users. We're down to about 750 right now.

The solution just gave us another layer of protection from zero-day threats, because you can't always trust what your users are doing. You just have to do what you can technically to try to mitigate that.

I'm on the security department, so it's just in the layer of our prevention to give us protections against, for example, ransomware that might kick off and try to execute different files. If someone downloads something or whatever, it has to be whitelisted first. It has to be approved before it can run it all.

That's better to me than some signature-based thing, because it protects against zero-day. There are things that it doesn't know about, so it has to check them. We have Check Point now as well, but we have a Check Point on our firewalls, not our endpoints.

We have another piece of that infrastructure that does what they call threat emulation. You may have heard of it. It's like sandboxing where it takes files that it doesn't know about, puts them in a VM-type environment, and it kicks them off to see if there's any malware or tendencies that might look like malware, that kind of thing.

It's also a zero-day type of prevention thing, but it kicks them off in a safe environment so that you can see what it's doing. You need integration with Check Point to do that, but that integration went away with the latest release, the one we just put out there.

That was a big part of why we liked Carbon Black, because it is integration to not only do the whitelisting, but also we could have automatic rules set up so that if a new file got downloaded by a user, we could automatically send that over to Check Point and it could do its emulation on it in the sandbox. And if it came back clean, then we could automatically approve it.

We wouldn't have to go through a manual process of having our people approve every single file that comes across as having been seen before. So, it was a really good way to work those two products together. But that went away. And so now I'm like, "Okay, what are we going to do now?" I hadn't looked at the Harmony Endpoint at all.

I haven't looked at Check Point's piece, but I was wondering to myself, "If it does something like Carbon Black was doing and then we already have Check Point on the other one, that would work." So, that was what I was trying to do.

There could be more knowledge. I think they made a mistake when they took away the Check Point integration, because it provides more automation and also more threat intelligence. Maybe you didn't see something within Carbon Black's sphere of what it knows, within their product line or their threat cloud or whatever they use for their intelligence. Maybe it didn't see anything of the files that it knows about, but what about somebody else's? And what about kicking into another product that does those kinds of things like sandboxing?

I don't know why they would take that away. That doesn't make sense to me because they need to expand on that. The more they expand on that, the more confidence you have as a security guy. You have more confidence that that file is clean, and there's nothing bad about it. Bringing back the integration with Check Point would be a good start.

This product is being used extensively in our organization. I'm actually looking for a replacement because of the fact that we lost that integration. That's really crucial, honestly. Otherwise, it becomes much more manpower-intensive. I need to spend more man-hours going through it instead of using automations.

I prefer to set up things so my team doesn't have to spend a huge amount of time running down rabbit trails all the time. The more we can automate and still be secure about it, that is what we try to do.

There are no additional features I would like to see added. I know they already have a cloud offering as well. You can manage things through their cloud for people that are always on-site. We mostly just use it for our own managed devices. We didn't really put it on. We never planned and don't plan to put it on or make it available to a BYOD kind of thing. This is all company-managed devices.

It just made more sense for us to do it internally than putting it in the cloud. But we could have done either one, I suppose. But since we started out inside, we just kept it that way. It was just easier.

I have been using this solution for five years.

It's stable.

The solution is scalable. We have never had an issue.

I would rate technical support 5 out of 5.

We did a proof of a couple different products, but we chose CB. And we've been with them since, because they do a good job. They've been pretty easy to manage, and they've had good support. So, we've actually been really happy with them.

It was pretty straightforward. It took some time to roll out. We wanted to eventually get to a point where we are now, which was to totally block everything we don't know about. But that didn't come out of the box. You had to let things run for a while.

It did a good job of reporting things, but not blocking so we could go through there and say, "Okay, these are legitimate files. Or these files were signed with these certificates from these vendors that we can trust," for example. We spent six or eight months going through everything before we actually turned it into full blocking mode. As far as initial rollout, it was fairly simple, and it's been fairly easy to upgrade the agents.

We ran into some issues with some of the MSIs and things or some systems when we tried to update some things and it broke. I'd probably rate the setup a four out of five.

We do deployment slowly and in phases. We could have deployed it pretty fast, actually. But it took us about three months to deploy everything because we wanted to make sure we had test groups of machines that we put into each department or each part of the organization, because they do different things. We didn't want to inadvertently start breaking certain things. So, we took our time pulling it out. But I think, essentially, it could have been deployed in probably a few weeks at the most.

We have a team of about five people who take care of maintenance.

We implemented it through an in-house team.

The licensing cost is on the more expensive side, but I thought it was worth it because they did a good job. It was one of the vendors I truly didn't have to worry about too much until this latest upgrade.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. 

I'd say, "go for it" if you don't have or need Check Point for an integration. But if you're relying on that kind of integration, if you really need that like we did, then of course I wouldn't go that route.

If I were to make a recommendation to somebody else just starting out, my advice is to check out the cloud first.

We use this solution as our endpoint security system. The solution is cloud-based.

The solution is very useful and easy to handle. You don't need much intervention with this product.

The client performance could be improved. When you install it in the client, the performance gets a bit disturbed.

In the user interface, the user needs to have more visibility regarding what's happening because it gives you a very simple client for the user. It doesn't give a full output for the user. It would be great if that could be improved.

I have been using this solution for more than four years. We are working with the latest version.

The solution is really stable. 

It is scalable.

The local technical support is very poor, but the support from headquarters is very nice.

For the local technical support, I would rather rate it at one, even zero, out of five. I would rate the global support at three or four out of five.

We previously used Kaspersky, and we switched to Carbon Black because it's a cloud-based application. It also requires minimum handling and basically runs on its own when you set the policy, so it's very easy.

The solution is a bit complex. Deployment took around six months.

The partners helped us. 

The license is annual. It's a standard license.

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10 because of the support.

The product is very smooth and pretty simple. I like it, and anyone can use it. My advice is to be careful about the partners when you're selecting. 

The solution is  deployed in our computers in the company. However, I can't speak to the use cases, as I'm still quite new to the company.

After we apply some policies we will receive, for example, alerts. We'll look at the devices that have given us alerts and we'll look to see if there is an issue. Then we can prioritize the issues into high and low categories.

We try to know what is a malicious file or malicious application and we can investigate what's happening according to the alerts in Carbon Black. Many times we've found that our policies avoid false positives. That said, sometimes, we have false positives and we get many alerts. We're working with this in Carbon Black.

Carbon black is basically blocking my application. I cannot open files and I cannot install software without it passing the policies. Not just any application can be installed on our computers. They need to be pre-approved. If we need to, however, we can manually bypass to finish an installation.

The solution allows you to override it and manually install an application if you need it ti.

It's very good at alerting you to malicious content or unauthorized software. 

We can access computers remotely if we need to.

Sometimes the solution blocks items that were previously approved and we don't know why.

It is sometimes hard when I attempt to investigate, to know the commands. It's not easy to do that. You need to upload the right information.

Occasionally, when we get alerts, we don't get all the information we need, such as the computer's serial number.

If I reveal an alert in a new window, I need to go back to the main link as it doesn't work.

Sometimes we need to close the solution and then open it up again.

Occasionally, we'll have issues with the latest version and they'll basically tell us that they will improve it in the next iteration. They need to work on their version release quality.

It would be good to have more information about the devices. If you get an alert that a malicious file is on your computer, Carbon Black really doesn't give you the full picture. We also need to wait for the user who owns the computer to be online before we can investigate everything. It's hard when you are working across time zones.

I started using the solution two weeks ago. I don't have a lot of experience with it just yet.

The stability could be better. It changes from version to version and from day to day. Sometimes it works perfectly, and sometimes there are issues and we need to close it and re-open the application.

We do have a person at Carbon Black that, if we have issues, we can reach out to. We let them know when we are having problems and they try to assist. I can't recall if it's email or some other type of internal support system that we go through.

Sometimes they have answers for us, and sometimes we have to wait for a new version. There's no guarantee our problems will be fixed immediately.

By the time I joined the company, the solution was already deployed. I was not part of the implementation process. I can't speak to how easy or difficult the solution is to implement.

We have deployed different versions of the solution. At this moment we have 3.5 or we have, for example, for Windows we have 3.1. We deploy it to many computers and in different countries. You need to upgrade or maybe you need to downgrade, depending on the device it's attached to. For example, we have many servers including 2016 and 2019 versions, and then we have different versions of Windows.

When we decide to deploy a new version we deploy it throughout the region. We have been in America, Asia, and Europe. 

I'd advise other potential users that, like any solution, you need to know how to use it, you need to know how to implement, and you need to know how to do the best configuration and update that configuration. If you don't have a good configuration on any application, it will work not for you.

In general, the solution is good. I would rate it at an eight out of ten.