There are multiple solutions in the field of Security Information and Event Management(SIEM), and every solution has advantages and disadvantages. Splunk and ArcSight are the two most famous SIEM software solutions. While Splunk and ArcSight have similar features, there are essential differences that might help you make the decision for your organization.
Outline
- What is Splunk
- Capabilities and Features of Splunk
- What is ArcSight?
- Capabilities and Features of ArcSight
- ArcSight vs Splunk
- Support and Implementation
- Cloud and On-Premises
- Integration
- Analytics and Search
- Pricing
- Scalability
- Ease of Use
- Deployment
- Customization
- Flexibility
- Platform
- Dashboards and Visualizations
- Alerts and Notifications
- Reporting and APIs
- Conclusion
What is Splunk?
Splunk is a famous SIEM tool that allows security teams to get end-to-end visibility into malware activities and business risks throughout your hybrid network environment. Splunk is developed on the Splunk operational intelligence platform.
It supports the activities of the SOC(Security Operations Center) in various ways like threat monitoring and search, detection and correlation, reporting activities, and incident response on data from the security devices and applications.
Key Features and Capabilities of Splunk
1) Splunk offers ready-to-use intelligence from Splunk’s users and the entity behavior analytics and threat research team that we can utilize for enhancing detection.
2) Correlate, Investigate, Analyze, and Aggregate activities context throughout on-site and multi-cloud, all from one integrated view.
3) Dashboards for security metrics and visual displays support your continuous security monitoring strategy.
4) Machine data from the cloud and on-site sources allows you to get complete visibility for the rapid identification of malware threats in your environment.
5) Splunk Cloud ESIM delivers rapid time to value, enabling security teams to concentrate on other security activities.
What is ArcSight?
ArcSight is an integrated security information and event management tool built to enable enterprises to identify and prioritize security threats and trace and organize incident response and compliance activities.
It comes incorporated with security response, orchestration, automation, and other capabilities that make automation of incident response and behavior analytics possible.
Want to become a Certified ArcSight Developer? Go through MindMajix’s ArcSight Training.
Capabilities and Features of ArcSight
The following are the essential features and capabilities of ArcSight:
1) Compliance reporting and automation feature enables organizations to streamline compliance reporting efforts for matching several regulatory requirements.
2) ArcSight endorses various ESM systems with the automatic failover capabilities of optimal performance.
3) ESM endorses case data or event retrieval from the application with the REST-based API.
4) ESM will support the capability to change configurations on the remote connectors from the ArcSight console, Event Time Adjustments, Event Filtering, and Aggregation.
5) Threat Intelligence feeds offer prohibited threat intelligence and analysis from multiple resources for supporting responsive efforts.
6) ESM enables us to schedule the reports and deliver the results automatically to critical stakeholders.
Splunk vs ArcSight
1) Support and Implementation
Because of its product depth, ArcSight requires a dedicated person to operate and can be quite difficult. The vendor is regularly needed to get the system up and working.
Splunk is easy to implement. Initial deployment can be achieved through the cloud. Because of the complexity and size, it requires skilled resources and vendor support to deploy and operate.
2) Cloud and On-Premises
Splunk training is cloud-native, and it does not provide on-site appliances but offers software for on-premises deployment if required. ArcSight has various options for cloud and on-site.
3) Integration
The big strength of Splunk is its capability to integrate data streams from various sources. Some users consume several PB per day. It supports various formats like .csv, .xml, and .json files.
ArcSight handles hundreds of data sources and thousands of events per second. It can integrate with AI tools and Machine Learning.
4) Analytics and Search
Spark is mainly used for monitoring and analyzing data created from several machines. It is suitable for analyzing the massive number of log files created by the enterprise systems.
ArcSight enhances data in real-time for enhancing analytics accuracy. Analytics performance and Queries are easy. It will handle hundreds of thousands of servers.
5) Pricing
Neither Splunk nor ArcSight is Cheap. The different modules of Splunk have a reputation for being expensive. Moreover, complementary modules can send the budget much higher.
ArcSight is also costly. Its pricing is as per the data consumed and events per second. Splunk opts for pricing as per the maximum daily data volume.
6) Scalability
Both Splunk and ArcSight can scale to manage massive volumes of data needed for enterprises of all sizes, comprising very large organizations.
7) Ease of Use
Splunk will be considered as more user-friendly than ArcSight, even though both tools need a similar level of expertise to configure and set up.
8) Deployment
ArcSight supports both distributed and centralized deployments and will be deployed on-site as software or an appliance or in the cloud.
Splunk ES will be deployed as the software on-site, through the SaaS solution Splunk Cloud, in a public or private cloud, or in a hybrid deployment.
9) Customization
Splunk is largely customizable, while ArcSight is firm in its configuration options. ArcSight can be complex to configure and set up, particularly for organizations that do not have experience with the SIEM tools.
10) Flexibility
Splunk is mainly flexible and can be utilized for several use cases, from monitoring to business analytics, while ArcSight is particularly used for security intelligence.
11) Platform
Splunk is a standalone platform that we can deploy in any software and hardware environment and can continuously integrate with any platform.
Whereas ArcSight is the HP enterprise that helps organizations secure their data using security analytics.
12) Dashboards and Visualizations
The ArcSight includes dashboards that allow us to visualize and analyze possible threats. The dashboards integrate intelligence from different sources of your organization’s environment, like real-time monitoring and correlation with data from ArcSight.
Splunk comes with predefined dashboards and custom glass table views that allow security teams to visualize the network security posture, like trending indicators, security and performance metrics, and static and dynamic dashboards.
13) Alerts and Notifications
ArcSight security alerts are aimed at warning users of threats and, evoke a response, and expedite issue resolution. It correlates alerts and events to detect high-priority threats in the environment.
Splunk offers a library of alerts that preemptively informs the security teams about malicious behaviors, resource availability, security events, utilization data, and other possible problems.
14) Reporting and APIs
ArcSight enables us to create and export innovative reports on the dashboard. We can customize the reports for meeting particular regulatory requirements. The API feature of ArcSight enables comprehensive integration in the SOC environments.
Splunk offers various in-built reports developed to satisfy particular regulatory needs like PCI DSS compliance. It also supports integration with third-party tools with its additional features.
Conclusion
Splunk and ArcSight are very good platforms to use, and a comprehensive study is needed before deciding to work with either of the two platforms. For those who want an all-inclusive security and IT management platform, Splunk suits them. But if only SIEM is required, then ArcSight surpasses Splunk in various aspects. I hope this ArcSight vs Splunk blog will give you enough information about the differences between Splunk and ArcSight. If you have any queries, let us know by commenting below.
Author Bio:
Kalla Saikumar is a technology expert and is currently working as a Marketing Analyst at MindMajix. Write articles on multiple platforms such as Tableau, PowerBi, Business Analysis, SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, and other courses. And you can join him on LinkedIn and Twitter.