ArcSight vs Splunk: Top SIEM Solutions Compared

ArcSight vs Splunk

This article examines some of the most important aspects of each solution, along with their strengths and drawbacks, and also their potential for future application. To become a security professional, you have to accredit the certification with this Arcsight Training course that aids you in mastering the security tasks in an organization.
ArcSight and Splunk products have received positive feedback from analysts and customers alike. Both are excellent choices for organizations wanting to buy a SIEM solution. While Splunk earns great accolades for easy usage, scaling it up can be challenging. And meanwhile, ArcSight has an open design and gives an exceptional level of detail to its users, few users have been frustrated about the learning curve.

Splunk and ArcSight Options and Features

Up to 75,000 EPS can be collected and correlated using ArcSight. ArcSight Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) was purchased by Micro Focus from HPE in 2017. The system incorporates an open security data architecture, correlation in real-time, and an approach driven by analytics.
Splunk ES provides users with a security-specific data view, boosting detection and incident response capabilities. The Dashboard of Security Posture tracks critical indicators of security and metrics to provide precise situational awareness. To match the user’s demands, every data source aspect, key indications, and visual display can be customized.
More than a thousand applications and add-ons are available in Splunk’s Splunkbase app store. The Initiative for Adaptive Response is a security collaboration led by Splunk and includes over 30 partners. It aids in the integration of threat intelligence, endpoint security, and cloud security technologies.

SIEM’s Recent Product Enhancements

ArcSight ESM now has a distributed mode of correlation, which allows many instances of aggregators and correlators to be deployed to speed up processing. In 2017, ArcSight Investigate, an intuitive security hunt, and investigation solution were released. It offers third-party analytics and machine learning tools with clean, enriched security data.
Content Update for Splunk ES is a service that updates security content regularly. Users are capable of designing and loading their ML models for identifying customized threats with UBA 4.0.

Weaknesses and Strengths: ArcSight

Data can be ingested from various sources, and ArcSight’s open platform allows data structure that can be employed outside of the ArcSight solution. Its application programming interface enables SOC environments with deep integration, and it could be fully customized to support compliance-related use cases and threat management.
Yet, according to the research company, numerous aspects of the architecture of ArcSight were being changed before the acquisition of Micro Focus, so prospective consumers should double-check that Micro Focus would keep its promises about functioning and support.
Investigate, ADP, and other components have been added to provide better analytics while maintaining legacy capabilities. “As an outcome, client choices about the deployment of specific system components may result in data duplication,” Gartner advises.

Weaknesses and Strengths: Splunk

As per Gartner, Splunk’s broad partner ecosystem provides Integration services in a wide range and new content. Splunk customers can leverage its Machine Learning Toolkit and third-party app developers to access sophisticated analytics capability incorporated into the core search capabilities.
Yet, Gartner reports that clients that have deployed Splunk often express concerns about the license model and implementation costs. Moreover, meanwhile, Splunk UBA is appealing to the users of Splunk who wish to include UBA functionality, other UEBA solutions compete with it, a few of which also include SIEM capabilities.
Buyers contemplating utilizing SIEM using Splunk and a UEBA third-party solution should check the integration degree between the two solutions and analyze the providers’ commitment to continuous integration, according to the research company.

The users of SIEM weigh in

Splunk receives a rating of 8/10 on average from users, with ArcSight coming in second at 7.9/10. Splunk receives a 4.3/5 rating from Gartner Peer Insights users, while ArcSight gets a 3.9/5. Splunk’s SIEM solution enables new correlations types that were formerly impossible to establish with classic SIEMs like QRadar or ArcSight. Splunk’s license model may appear to be costly, but reviewers say it’s well worth it.
“Speed up the exposure of inappropriate conduct on the network and in information systems,” users said of the product.
Splunk is a big data management platform that excels at both unstructured and structured data processing.
“With no prior knowledge, the initial configuration was completed in a matter of hours, including data ingestion.” Biggley wrote.
Yet, he noted in a blog post about the company’s Splunk training program that installing Splunk at scale isn’t easy.
Karthik Velli, a security solutions delivery consultant at Paladion Networks, has written that even though ArcSight is more expensive than many other SIEM solutions, he considers the cost is well worth it.
Velli’s ArcSight, according to Velli CEO John Velli, provides “a more precise technique of collecting needed logs/events” than competitors.
Yet, ArcSight administration isn’t simple, according to Velli. “To identify and fix the root cause, the administrator must have extensive experience,” he noted.

Deployment

ArcSight can be implemented on-premises as software, as an appliance, or in a cloud, and supports both centralized and distributed deployments. Splunk ES could be installed directly, as a SaaS solution through Splunk Cloud, in a private or public cloud, or as a hybrid deployment.

Structure of Pricing

ArcSight has many licensing models and prices, ranging from pricing based on ingestion to a model of all-you-can-eat. The price of Splunk is determined by the no. of users and the ingested data volume. For a single user, there is a free version with a daily usage limit of 500 MB. For 1 GB of data every day, Splunk Enterprise costs $150 per month.

Conclusion:
We have successfully analyzed the comparisons between ArcSight and Splunk. Both have got their benefits and drawbacks and their incorporation is dependent on the needs of an organization. We have discussed all the business aspects including the features, vendor comparisons, deployment, and pricing structure.

ArcSight vs Splunk