Review: SecureWorks

For: Fast response times, great information sharing in the portal, support personnel are well trained.
Against: Difficult and lengthy installation.
Verdict: With the exception of the installation, this offering was well done. Response times were all faster than the SLA required times, and the ease of reaching support personnel was impressive.

The offering provides a secure portal for access to threats and reports. The portal is well done and with a few minutes of explanation from the SecureWorks engineer, the portal becomes easy to understand and navigate.

The installation of the product was difficult and because of that difficulty SecureWorks deploys an engineer onsite to perform the installation. This offering was also the most complex because the offering included managing the lab firewall, installation of the IPS device, and installing a server agent on the target web application server. There were multiple difficulties even for our small test implementation. We had to wonder what the implementation would be like in a production environment.

Documentation was not provided because of the onsite installation. Training is provided as part of the offering for the secure portal, and we rated the documentation portion of the review based on the quality of training, which was excellent. However, we would have liked some documentation left behind for when the administrator forgets something or has a question. Also, if there is a change in administrators, new training would be required.

Phone, email and the web portal are the best means of contact to the SecureWorks staff, who are knowlegable, helpful and easily reachable. Their response to our attacks and probes was excellent.

The pricing for the SecureWorks offering is in the middle of the price spectrum for products reviewed in this Group Test. Pricing is based on the number of services provided by SecureWorks, and, like all MSSPs, is unique to the implementation. When considering the responsiveness and the number of features, the price is reasonable for most enterprises.

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