Skybox Security Suite Reviews

Our company's main use case for Skybox Security Suite is typically for user architects. Since our company primarily serves enterprise clients, Skybox is often used as a cost-effective solution.

Overall, the tool has helped us reduce risks. If any step is missing, it's easier for my team or engineers to identify it. The tool provides accurate recommendations based on the data. Its integration is easy, and I have integrated it with Fortinet firewalls. 

The setup is expensive.

I have been using the product for one and a half years. 

The product's support offers remote assistance and is available in many countries. 

The tool's deployment takes one month to complete. 

Skybox Security Suite has indeed helped us reduce costs. The prices of AlgoSec and Skybox Security Suite are approximately 50 percent different. The tool may require special vendor support from abroad, resulting in slightly higher costs. Its pricing is in the middle. 

I rate the overall product a seven out of ten. 

The performance could be good because we chose it at the time, but it is too complex for us to appreciate its performance because we lack the necessary skills.

They are not satisfied with the complexity of the solution and the price.

To be used, we must have proper skills that require additional support, and the entire potential of the tool is not utilized and addressed. As a result of a lack of skills, it is complex.

Network auditing, which AlgoSec does, could be included, or perhaps Sky Box does but we don't know how to use it.

The company has been using Skybox Security Suite for quite a while, and they are thinking about changing the solution.

They have been working with it for at least three years.

We are in a complex environment, and we have three teams, with approximately 30 people using it on various entities.

We did not contact technical support. We attempted to have the necessary skills in-house, but it was insufficient. That is why we are seeking alternatives.

We also, work with Tufin. We have not been working with it for that long, we are in the POC phase. We are testing the tool.

We are also considering AlgoSec. I believe that is our current favorite, but we don't have a final decision at this time, but it appears to be AlgoSec.

The environment is very complex.

The deployment took a long time. We are considering changing it because it simply did not finish. It's as if we didn't do it properly.

We have a team of two to maintain this solution.

The licensing fee is paid yearly and is approximately $100,000.

I am researching firewall security management tools like Tufin, and AlgoSec.

As a product manager, I don't work with any products. I am just assisting team members in finding alternatives. I am a consultant.

I believe it is a management contract. I believe that such solutions should not be handled on-premise, and we must obtain a proper support contract with SLAs from the service provider. When we do install it on-premises, we have no support, no feedback, and no commitment, except to extend the contract.

We are both customers and a partner with Skybox Security Suite.

I would rate Skybox Security Suite a five out of ten.

It's for integrating with firewall logs, and we are looking for automation where we can actually select all of the network architecture. Then, we can understand the rules that are available. We can look at the complexity as to whether the rules are compliant as per the standards or not. It's depends on the compliant order.

We are currently working on rule review and compliance. The logging features are good.

As for room for improvement, there are issues in logging. The logs are not coming into the log.

There are multiple dashboards but no custom dashboard. It would be good to include a custom dashboard so that we can actually choose which field and what kinds of things we want to look at.

We've been using it for probably more than six months.

In terms of scalability, I would give it a six out of ten. The logging features are good, but zones and zone mapping to get interactive topology are not straightforward.

I would give technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I used AlgoSec at another company. Skybox Security Suite is nicer than AlgoSec.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It gets more complex only when you try to integrate with the logs.

The implementation of Skybox is straightforward and you can integrate and get the logs and compliance reporting.

The integration might be a little tricky and may need tweaking.

Overall, I give Skybox Security Suite a seven out of ten.

I mainly use Skybox to harden firewall rules and for rule usage analysis and compliances. We also use it for configuration compliance for firewalls, most of the Cisco switches and routers, and enterprise firewall vendors.

The most impressive feature is optimization and clean-up.

Skybox should improve their UX features by making them easier to use. They're also trying to transfer from Java GUI to web-based systems, but it's not consistent right now, so they need to develop and improve the features on that side. I mean, the native Java based GUI results and the new Web GUI results are not always the same. I have experienced some inconsistency results among them. So, I need to trust newer GUI for results.

I've been using Skybox Security Suite for more than five years.

Skybox is scalable.

Skybox's technical support is fine, but getting help takes some time because they request rules and models and pack logs instead of offering a remote session.

Neutral

The initial setup was extremely straightforward - the installation took about twenty minutes, but the integration took some more time because there were lots of different vendors and integrations. We also had some problems with login and port rules, which delayed integration. 

Skybox comes with extra licenses and has a change management license. The licenses are expensive, but they come with extra value.

Skybox is a full-feature product that comes with different modules like firewall and network assurance, network mapping, and a vulnerability control module. It's a very, very good solution for medium and large companies. I would advise anyone thinking of implementing Skybox to use a professional team to do the integration. I would rate Skybox seven out of ten.

Our clients are using it from the firewall assurance perspective. They want to do an audit of their firewalls. So, the use cases are related to policy audit, such as which shadow rules they have and which rules are not getting utilized. 

We are recommending the latest version to our clients because sometimes, a lot of integrations are required with respect to different firewalls and virtual devices. If we are using an old version, some of the things are not getting integrated. That's why we are going with the latest or the latest minus one version.

To my knowledge, most of the deployments that we have done are on-prem.

It can be integrated with a vulnerability management solution. When a client comes, apart from pitching network and firewall change management, we are recommending having vulnerability management. So, rather than just having the audit of the firewall, they can integrate it with their vulnerability management solution, which could be Rapid7, Qualys, or any other solution. This provides them the most value out of the platform. That is the way we are approaching our customer base.

It is reliable, and their support is good.

Change Manager can be improved. If they can improve Change Manager so that whatever we want to do on a firewall, we are able to do it through Change Manager, it will be helpful for us. Whenever we are doing a change, it only does them at an L3 and L4 level, but all the firewalls are at the application layer. So, whatever needs to be done on the firewall, we aren't able to get it done through Change Manager. Currently, this functionality is not there because of which we are sometimes losing customers. I can create a role on Layer 3, Layer 4, but when it comes to the application layer, such as configuring and defining URLs or other things at the application level, it can't be done through Change Manager. Customers demand that they should be able to do everything through Change Manager. They don't want to do it through some other mechanism to accomplish their complete change management policy. They don't want to use a firewall manager because sometimes, they don't have any manager. They ask if they can use our solution so that a manager is not required. If Change Manager can do all the management automatically without involving any other manager, it will be great. They can also provide better integration with other managers so that everything can be done through a central point.

On the OT side, if they can provide more visibility, it would help. We are working on some of the features related to OT, so more visibility would be helpful.

We have been working with this solution for two to three years.

It is reliable. Whatever features are there, they are reliable.

As of now, we don't have any challenges with scalability. If we are fulfilling all prerequisites, it is okay. 

Earlier, in some of the cases, it was a bit slow, but if we are fulfilling all the requirements, it gives a good performance. For a PoC, when we were using an old platform, the performance was not up to the mark, but when we use the latest platform and hardware, the performance is good.

Their support is good. Support is not a challenge.

It is not complex.

We are acting as a vendor and distributor for Skybox in India. So, our team is taking care of whatever implementations are coming on behalf of Skybox.

Licensing is normally on a yearly basis. There may also be a perpetual license. Normally, the customers ask for a lower price. If you want to sell more, you have to think about it.

I would definitely recommend this solution. If you have a complex network with more than 20 firewalls, it is better to go with this solution. It might not be suitable if you have only four or five firewalls, but when the network is complex, or you are managing a data center with a lot of security challenges, I would recommend this solution.

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10.

We use the firewall assurance and the network assurance when we use change manager to check any changes in our firewall. We also use FortiGate's firewall for all our company. For six months, until 2020, we used the vulnerability control module to analyze our infrastructure.

For one of my customers, we used firewall assurance, network assurance and change manager - three modules. We optimized the firewall appliance and rules for one of the Ukrainian banks.

Skybox Security Suite is a great, strong solution. But you need a good engineer with high-level technical skills. For businesses it is a great solution - you look at the pie chart and understand everything. But if we talk about technical expertise, you need one or two technical expertise guys on your team to support this platform. You need to check, understand and discuss all cases and events, analyze these events, and make changes in your infrastructure. In terms of the technical aspect, it's good. For businesses, it is great.

The features that I have found most valuable with Skybox Security Suite, and this is because I work on the security side, are the firewall assurance, the change manager and the vulnerability control. These three features are the most impressive from Skybox Security.

In terms of the firewall rules, compliance, and vulnerability control, I need to understand what changes were provided from my IT team. I need to understand how these changes impact our compliance. I need to understand this to make decisions.

In terms of the vulnerability control, we need to understand how changes in our infrastructure impact the security in our company, such as having an open port to LinkedIn or Facebook. This could be very bad for the cybersecurity in our company, because some hackers or some non-loyal employees could make a lot of trouble.

So we need to understand how our changes impact the cybersecurity of our company. And Skybox Security is one of greatest solutions for this because you can see the firewall and the network infrastructure and you understand what's happening and how it could impact your cybersecurity.

In terms of what could be improved, I would say support for Cisco Firepower. This is one of the biggest segments in the Ukraine market. Many customers use Cisco Firepower. It is not a good solution for me, but it make sense. The second feature that could be improved is a deeper integration with Palo Alto. One of my customers uses Palo Alto and during the trial period with Skybox Security, we had some issues because when the IT administrator used the rules Skybox Security didn't understand. But it's not really a problem with Skybox Security. This was a problem for the company who used these stupid rules.

I have been using Skybox Security Suite for the last 15 months. 

In terms of stability, humans write the code. So any solution will have some issues. So yeah, we have one or two issues, but for me, Skybox Security support is one of quicker supports in the world. I am familiar with support from Symantec and from Microsoft, these are bad support-wise. I also know about the support from McAfee and SolarWinds. For me, SolarWinds, Skybox and FireEye have quick, good support.

Support is good for me.

The initial setup with Skybox Security is hard. You need one or two strong security engineers on your team. We have that. One of my colleagues has great experience as a cybersecurity engineer officer. So we deployed, but during deployment we asked the Skybox team for support. You need to understand what you are doing and why you are doing it.

We use an NFR, not for resale, license because we have a strong relationship with Skybox Security. But Skybox Security sent me yearly support for the license, not monthly.

Skybox Security has good pricing.

If you need something like Skybox, you would pay more money than for a cybersecurity platform, because you need FireMon for firewalls. For firewalls, you would need a subscription to Cisco Tetration, for example, or for something else. These are more expensive solutions in collaboration. So if you want to save money and save time, use Skybox Security.

I would absolutely recommend using Skybox Security.

If you need to check compliance and to understand how your IT teams work, use Skybox Security. If you need understand, like a clear glass of water, how your IT infrastructure works, use Skybox.

Tenable or Qualys or Rapid7 vulnerability controls in your infrastructure could be installed for vulnerability scans. But they don't know what kind of attack could be used or what vector of attack could be used. If you use Skybox you will see the impact, all the issues with your infrastructure and your configuration, and you can quickly change the situation to be more protected from outside and inside attacks.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Skybox Security an eight.

We use the product for network visibility and firewall and vulnerability management.

The product's most valuable feature is vulnerability management.

Skybox Security Suite's attack surface management feature needs improvement.

We have been using Skybox Security Suite for four or five years.

I rate the product's stability a five or six out of ten. We encountered a few issues during data migration in terms of customization.

The product is highly scalable. It is suitable for enterprise businesses. I rate its scalability a ten out of ten.

The local support services are good. However, we encountered difficulties while using the multilingual feature for communicating with the support team.

Neutral

The initial setup process is easy. However, the complexity depends on the customer's environment, including the broker and control management system of a specific cloud. It takes around three hours to complete the process and a month for system integration.

The software is expensive. I rate its pricing an eight out of ten.

I rate Skybox Security Suite a six out of ten.

Skybox Security Suite is used for security assessments. They have a central part of the security solution that aggregates assets and layers. It's an all-around solution for the security posture.

The most valuable features of Skybox Security Suite are all the modules that are provided, such as vulnerability assessments and network, and firewall assessments.

Skybox Security Suite can improve the change management module. It is the one part of the tool that is used with the firewall devices and you have a change management module that is used to record changes of all firewalls in the company. It's not compatible with all brands, this is where they can improve the solution.

I have been using Skybox Security Suite for three years.

Skybox Security Suite is stable.

The scalability of the Skybox Security Suite is good. You can put as many collectors that you need. We have three or four large installations and we didn't have any major issues.

We used the technical support from Skybox Security Suite two or three times. We had some problems with calling from Italy and this individual was really great about the technical support. He had a deep knowledge of the complete solutions. We have great support from him.

I rate the support from Skybox Security Suite a five out of five.

Positive

The initial setup of Skybox Security Suite is straightforward. If you buy a virtual appliance, it's already set up. You only need to add layer three devices and the other sources for all the assets in the company. The documentation is easy to follow and useful.

The price of the Skybox Security Suite can be expensive.

I have evaluated other solutions.

I would recommend others to try Skybox Security Suite before purchasing it because it replaces a couple of solutions from different vendors. If you have this all-in-one solution for that part of firewalls, network devices, and assets, all in one place, you can simulate the attack vector before you made the changes to the system. I would advise that your enterprise company purchase the solution because if you want to add the assets and they are the most costly, it's not an inexpensive solution. If you want to monitor firewalls and network devices, then the cost is reasonable.

I rate Skybox Security Suite a nine out of ten.

Skybox Security Suite does not have much competition but there other ones that are available are lacking features. This is the most complete solution available.

We are a system integrator and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients. This is one of the vendors that we focus on, from a security standpoint.

Skybox has an amazing portfolio that makes up the security solution. You can onboard your network devices with the network assurance module. This includes layer three, layer two switches, load balancers, and so on. This partially builds the network model for the infrastructure and the entire security platform is built off of that.

With the combination of the vulnerability management database and third-party integration, vulnerability management is very rich. When you add the network model, Skybox can tell you exactly which vulnerabilities in the infrastructure are exploitable. I have seen examples where there are 7,000 vulnerabilities exposed at one time. This includes highlighting things that are open, or exposed.

The most valuable feature is firewall management. It is excellent. It works by onboarding different firewall vendors and together with network assurance, builds a complete network model.

Vulnerability management is very good and it has its own vulnerability database. It gives you the ability to integrate with vulnerability management tools like Nessus, which is used by Tenable, Rapid7, and Qualys. The vulnerability software also integrates with endpoint software such as Symantec, Trend Micro, and McAfee. This is important because in this era, the biggest threat is from the endpoint. This is where most of the attacks are coming from these days.

Skybox integrates with patch management, which contributes to the broad functionality.

Everything is controlled from a single pane of glass.

The Skybox Suite includes change management, which makes up part of the complete security solution.

Skybox Horizon is a dashboard that shows you all of the modules. It is nice because it can show granularity at the level of interest for the NOC or SOC, but it can also give executive dashboarding for the VP or CTO at a business level that is not as concerned about the details.

The out-of-the-box compliance is very good, as it handles PCI and ISO.

The Network Assurance, which helps to create the network model, is not so rich. It tells you the best part, and it gives you the alternate routes that are available based on the configuration and the routing table, but it doesn't give you the analytics. One of the issues with security is that if the network model is incorrect then no matter what I add on top of it, it's going to be of no use. Network modeling is the foundation for vulnerability management, test management, firewall management, and change management.

The focus on risk analytics is not very good and should be improved. It relies on the CVSS (Common Vulnerability Security Score), which gives you a vulnerability score based on the standard. The difficulty with this is that sometimes, risks are based on critical assets, and these can differ between environments. My critical assets, for example, may be different than those of my customers. As such, it doesn't give you a fully-fledged risk score. On top of this, it doesn't give you the flexibility to configure a set of weights to adjust the criticality of the assets, the users, and the entities within the infrastructure.

Another area where Skybox lacks is the calculation for combinations and permutations of traffic from each interface. For example, in RedSeal, if traffic comes in from one interface and doesn't go out the desired interface, you can see what is vulnerable, what the vulnerability is, what is exposed, what is exploitable, whether it is subject to an insider threat or an outside threat, what the criticality is, and so on. It is all related to network modeling and seeing what happens when an interface goes down. In general, it needs to be enhanced.

They have to improve their integration with vulnerability management tools. It is good with some products, such as Tenable, but not really good with Rapid7.

Technical support can be improved in some regards because certain teams are better than others.

There is no dashboard for ISR compliance or NESA compliance.

3 years

Skybox Suite is an unstable solution.

This is a scalable solution.

In the region that I am working in, the director has indicated that we want to target organizations with a minimum of 15 firewalls and 500 devices. Essentially, the networks are very big, the firewalls and devices might be from different vendors, and the operations teams are having trouble managing them.

Skybox, from a scalability perspective, is only for customers with a very large environment that is complex.

Scalability is also a factor when a customer is migrating to the cloud. Specifically, when transitioning from on-premises to the cloud the customer will need cloud-based firewalls, load balancing, sandboxing, etc. This means that the network map in Skybox needs to include the cloud.

When I am working on a deployment or on a PoC, and I see an issue with the software that is not related to the configuration, I open a ticket with the support team.

I am not always satisfied with the support that they provide. In general, I am satisfied, but there are different teams within Skybox that handle different modules. The firewall management team is the best, the network assurance team is very good, and the vulnerability and threat management team is not so good. Sometimes, I get the wrong person and I have to escalate the ticket to the highest priority and get the engineering team on it. With change management, I have only had technical support in regards to a single client.

The initial setup is straightforward, as you have a template for the network assurance.

This solution can be installed on-premises or as a cloud-based deployment with the virtual edition. The architecture for the latter is very simple. In a small environment with less than 1,000 devices, you can use one server, install the software, and it has a database associated with it. You just have to make sure that it can be accessed by every device across the VLAN.

The tricky part of the configuration has to do with vulnerability management, threat management, and change management. When it comes to difficulty, change management is the hardest one when it comes to configuration. The reason for this is that customers normally have their own change management solution, such as ServiceNow and they are not very comfortable offloading the ITSM to do change management. It's a hard shift and a difficult sell. If it is done properly, however, it can automatically identify the vulnerabilities and threats and mitigate them as per the change management policy. Workflows need to be defined. For example, when a firewall change is needed then it needs to know the chain of approval. Since every customer has their own approval or rejection procedure, it has to be based on their requirements.

When it comes to deployment, we use a "Land and Expand" strategy. We land with network assurance and firewall management, which gives the customer a taste of the product. From there, we onboard vulnerability management and threat management. I don't recommend to anybody that they start with this solution full-fledged because it will not necessarily yield a better ROI.

For a network of perhaps a thousand network devices, if all of the ports are open and the permissions are in place, then it should not take longer than two days. You can take one extra day for fine-tuning, but three days is more than enough. After this, it will take another two days for firewall management. When we consider the vulnerability management and threat management modules, we have to take them on a case-by-case basis.

Sometimes, a customer will not have a vulnerability management tool like Tenable or Rapid7, so we rely solely on the Skybox vulnerability database. We also integrate with endpoint solutions because of the importance of protecting them. As an example, if the customer is using McAfee for the endpoint protection then it will take me around three days to complete the integration. Certain vendors do not provide out of the box integration, so we have to use the API, which adds to the time required for deployment. Often, it can be done in three days.

Finally, change management is a tough thing to do that depends on the use cases. Without this aspect considered, I would say that the deployment can be completed in 15 days. This is all for a typical deployment. If the customer needs customization then it will change the deployment date.

A deployment engineer is a single person and I can do the deployment myself. It is not often very complex, as long as things are done correctly from the beginning. The checklist has to be complete, which means that the image has to be stable and the compute that you requested is there. You also need to ensure that the required port numbers for device accessibility are there from the server, and the database is there. Once all of that is in place, the configuration is not difficult.

When it comes to integration, the other vendor has to be available during the same period. It is sometimes difficult to schedule but it is necessary to complete the deployment in a specified timeframe.

The ROI would not be good for a smaller company, which is why Skybox is better for large networks. It may take three or four years for a small company to break even.

All of the firewall vendors have their own firewall manager. Fortinet, for example has FortiManager, whereas Palo Alto has Panorama. If a customer has only four firewalls and they are all from Fortinet then it makes more sense for them just to use FortiManager.

The value really comes in when there are a large number of firewalls and they are from different vendors. This is where 360-degree visibility really starts to help. When you see the amount of time it saves, this is where the ROI becomes obvious.

I have been evaluating other options including RedSeal, AlgoSec, Tufin, and FireMon. Each vendor has its own strengths and weaknesses. I think that the network modeling capability in RedSeal is far ahead of the rest. Also, in terms of vulnerability management, RedSeal is amazing.

FireMon is really lacking in terms of network modeling.

My best choice is RedSeal.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this product is to make sure that they utilize it. The usage of it should be mandated for the NOC and SOC. They should use a single dashboard to take care of all of your infrastructure components.

When a Skybox representative visits to discuss this solution, it is important to discuss the use cases properly. Have a good project plan and it is also very important to have the right partner. They should be certified, trained, and involved at all stages.

Overall, it is a pretty good product. When you use it, you will see the benefit of it.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Our customers use it to control their network environment, firewall, and vulnerability equipment.

Skybox deployment is simple, and it's very useful. 

The cloud site could be better. They should provide some use cases to help users.

I have been using Skybox Security Suite for about one year.

The initial setup isn't so easy because many of our customers have issues getting all the configurations right. It's very complex.

I think the price is fair.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Skybox Security Suite a seven.