One thing is for sure about 2024: There has been no shortage of drama in the vendor landscape for cybersecurity teams. With four significant transactions and dozens of other smaller ones, the vendor landscape will no doubt look a lot different this time next year. One company that has bounced more than most is AlienVault.
Founded in 2007, AlienVault initially gained traction in the market with its open-source SIEM (OSSIM). With the introduction of its Unified Security Management (USM) platform, which integrated many capabilities into a single platform, the company experienced nice growth. In 2018, AT&T acquired the company, incorporating USM into AT&T’s security portfolio. Over the next five years, AlienVualt worked on integrating itself with the other products in AT&T’s portfolio to provide more value to its customers. The latest move in the AlienVault saga is the spinout to a joint venture known as LevelBlue. While these moves prompted many users to find new platforms over the past few years, many security teams continue to use what was formerly known as AlienVault to secure their environments or deliver security services to their customers.
Stellar Cyber continually works with AlienVault users who are looking to upgrade their security platform. Here are the top five reasons we hear these customers ultimately decided to move from AlienVault to Stellar Cyber:
Our Platform is Loaded
Let’s face it: there are tons of SIEM products on the market that, aside from a few bells and whistles, offer commoditized security capabilities. While that can be good if a security team is simply looking to duplicate their capabilities today, when making a change, why move to something that gives you what you already have when options available can give you more? Stellar Cyber includes many security capabilities that a typical SIEM does not include by default. While you might be able to add on some of these capabilities for an additional cost, Stellar Cyber includes everything you see below under a single license, single-price model. In our talks with these customers, many look at their potential move to Stellar Cyber as a way for them to rationalize some of the other products in their security stack. (aka, turning lemons into tasty lemonade)
Automated Threat Detection that Just Works
When you think of SIEM, what is the most significant negative that comes to mind first? If you are like most, you had images of creating dozens of detection and correlation rules regularly and managing the rules already in use to ensure you get some kind of value out of the SIEM investment. Many of the AlienVault customers we have spoken to have seen our SIEM platform’s ability to eliminate the need for them to manage and create their own correlation rules as a significant plus. In Stellar Cyber, we leverage a multi-mode approach to threat detection, using curated correlation rules that we deliver and our purpose-built AI/ML models to detect threats. Users can optionally create rules using our integrated threat-hunting module. We also use Graph Machine Learning to correlate threats and show how all the associated assets, users, files, and more are related.
In a Word: Simplicity
Cybersecurity can get complicated quickly, especially when more products are added to a security stack. From our perspective, vendors need to do everything they can to make things as simple as possible, so that is what we do. We do not load up our platform with “cool” features that require a PhD to run them. If something isn’t necessary to complete investigations, we don’t add it. If there is a more straightforward way for a user to access features in the platform, we do it. When AlienVault customers see our product, they typically cite the ease of use as the main reason they consider moving to Stellar Cyber.
Threat Hunting
In cybersecurity, threat hunting is often considered “nice-to-have” expertise on a team. In Stellar Cyber, however, we included threat-hunting capabilities in the platform, enabling virtually any security analyst to carry out threat-hunting tasks. We can offer this capability while other vendors cannot because of our data approach. We prioritize normalizing all ingested data, making it easier for our AI/ML to analyze it effectively. This effort also makes searching this vast amount of data fast and easy for anyone. When discussing this embedded capability with AlienVault users, they are intrigued about adding it to their teams without increasing resources.
On-Prem or Cloud
Last but certainly not least, when AlienVault users understand that Stellar Cyber works from the cloud, on-premises, or co-managed (or fully managed) by an MSSP) we have their full attention.
A vendor rarely makes the strategic decision to support both SaaS and on-premises versions of their product. Many vendors simply cannot afford to devote the time and resources required to deliver on-prem and SaaS versions of their products that offer the same outcomes, so they opt for SaaS only. Call us peculiar, but here at Stellar Cyber, we recognize that security teams must often deploy on-prem but are usually left to go without a product or figure out a way to make a SaaS version of a product that meets their needs. Vendors should make a security team’s life easier, not harder, so why make them jump through hoops to make our product work?
Therefore, if you need to deploy on-prem, we have you covered. As a plus, if you want to move to the cloud in the future, you can do that easily with Stellar Cyber, something not many vendors can offer.
Closing Thoughts
While LevelBlue might eventually deliver some interesting products and solutions, most cybersecurity teams are not in the position to “hope” for a positive outcome from their vendor. If you are a current AlienVault customer looking to get off this vendor carousel, contact us to set up a meeting to see how we can help evolve your cybersecurity approach.
