Review: Solutionary ActiveGuard

For: Fast response times, large breadth of product offerings, and support personnnel are well trained.
Against: Cost is higher than similiar offerings.
Verdict: A very good offering which exceeds all of the contracted terms, and provides a valuable service for clients. Those components make the solutionary offering a Recommended product.

The SLA includes three hour response for low level threats, one hour for medium-level threats, and 15 minutes for high-level threats. Solutionary responded with the 15-minute period for all events. We found that exceptional.

The support personnel possessed more than adequate knowledge and training and were personable and easy to work with. Reports are run by Solutionary and emailed to the client. Solutionary also has an offering that protects other non-web enabled applications, such as mail, VOIP, file transfer, Secure Shell and VPN access. The breadth of the offerings is consistent to above average compared with others in this Group Test.

There was no installation of the application due to the outsourced nature of the offering. The application was downloaded from the lab site and uploaded to the system, with no activity from SC Labs. Also, documentation was not needed because of the outsourced nature of the offering.

Phone and email support are available and readily usable clients.

The pricing for the Solutionary offering is at the high end of the spectrum of offerings in this Group Test, although, of course, pricing is implementation-dependent. The fact that the offering also includes web/application hosting must be taken into account when comparing the overall price.

Pricing is based on the number of devices needed/ monitored in the offering and also the number of alerts generated by the device. We found that a bit worrisome because it is not uncommon for intrusion detection systems to issue alerts that are false alarms.

Pricing for managed security services can be a bit of a black art since the level of effort required for any particular client may be hard to determine accurately in advance. Thus, many providers have emphasized automated systems and have placed less emphasis on engineer/analysts to save money. For all of that, however, considering superior performance and ease of implementation, we award this service our Recommended rating.

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