VMware Carbon Black Endpoint Reviews

We use VMware Carbon Black Endpoint to protect endpoints in our company.

The product enables device controls, helping us protect the devices and prevent data leakages.

The product’s most valuable feature is incident detection and response.

It is challenging to reach the product’s technical support team. This particular area needs improvement. The device control feature could also be compatible with the user’s profile as well.

We have been using VMware Carbon Black Endpoint for a year.

The product has good stability.

I rate the platform’s scalability an eight out of ten.

The initial setup process is simple.

VMware Carbon Black Endpoint generates a good return on investment regarding environment protection.

The product’s price is less expensive than other vendors.

I rate VMware Carbon Black Endpoint a seven out of ten. I recommend it to the companies with less budget. If there are no budget constraints, they can use other products like CrowdStrike Falcon or Cylance.

My company uses VMware Carbon Black Endpoint for generic endpoint activity detection. We also use it for some investigation using an osquery in our company. VMware Carbon Black Endpoint is useful for blocking some applications and vulnerability assessment of endpoints.

The most valuable feature of the solution is its EDR functionality. The osquery functionality of the product is also very good since it allows us to investigate special cases. Vulnerability management is another good feature of the product.

VMware Carbon Black Endpoint takes a step back when compared to other solutions in the market. Cortex XDR is a better solution compared to VMware Carbon Black Endpoint. In our company, we also wanted to have network detection, like a host-based IDS on VMware Carbon Black Endpoint, but we did not get it. The aforementioned reasons have forced our company to look for an upgrade or another solution altogether.

In the future, I would like to see VMware Carbon Black Endpoint offering a host-based intrusion detection system with a better incident response within the platform where you can raise an incident, assign it, and have some response functionality in it, like triaging the incident and other stuff.

I have been using VMware Carbon Black Endpoint for three years. I use the solution's cloud version, which is the latest version. I am a customer of the solution.

It is a stable solution.

Around ten to eleven people use the solution in our company.

In our company, we did not face many technical issues with the product. Over the span of the years we have been using the solution, there were only two not-so-difficult instances we encountered using the solution, but we were able to find the answers to resolve the issues. We did not face issues that needed the intervention of technical support.

I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

Previously, we were using a signature-based antivirus, Symantec Antivirus, in our company.

The initial setup of VMware Carbon Black Endpoint was easy.

The solution is deployed on a public cloud.

The deployment phase took about a month to get deployed to all the endpoints using the agent, but the most difficult part was tuning the policy, which took the most time based on the alarm policy and alert policy. I feel the aforementioned phases of deployment are a regular process.

I do not want to discuss the actual number of people involved in the deployment process, but I can say that the deployment was not done for a small company.

I was involved in the implementation phase of the solution.

Price-wise, VMware Carbon Black Endpoint is a highly-priced solution. Regarding the licensing cost of the solution, one needs to opt for an annual subscription.

One of the main advantages of Cortex XDR over VMware Carbon Black Endpoint is that Cortex XDR has an intrusion detection system. Cortex XDR has a host-based IDS, and such a feature doesn't exist in VMware Carbon Black Endpoint. Cortex XDR has VMware Carbon Black Endpoint's functions and much more than they need.

Palo Alto is a product that our company has considered during its current evaluation process.

I would say that VMware Carbon Black Endpoint is a very good solution for those planning to use it. If a person has certain cost constraints, then VMware Carbon Black Endpoint may not be the best solution since many cheaper or even open-source solutions can provide the same functionalities as VMware Carbon Black Endpoint. I feel that with a good budget, a better solution can be available in the market.

I rate the overall a seven and a half out of ten.

I rate Carbon Black CB Defense an eight out of ten for the ease of its initial setup.

The maturity of the Kubernetes security is absent in Carbon Black CB Defense. The solution has to mature on container security and a lot of cloud environment security. Security is available only for Windows, while security for Linux and Mac is not very strong.

The deadlock issue causes me to put more effort into installing an upgrade.

The numerous issues with the environment of the product solution should be addressed. Work orders are taking more than two months to get resolved. There's been one issue open for two months, and the solution they gave is being implemented step by step. Still, it is not meeting the requirements and breaking the system. Hence, our business is completely disturbed.

I have been using this solution for more than one year. I'm using Carbon Black CB Defense Version 3.9.

There are a lot of issues with the solution's stability. I rate Carbon Black CB Defense a four out of ten for stability.

I rate Carbon Black CB Defense a six out of ten for scalability. Recently, an event was not loading because of some issue with the AWS site.

Our organization is completely deployed with Carbon Black CB Defense. Some machines are sometimes not supported by Carbon Black CB Defense. In such cases, we use some other tool.

The solution’s deployment took seven to eight months.

Carbon Black CB Defense's deployment on Windows is pretty okay, but its Linux deployment is not so great because there is a minimum requirement for the kernel header. Without the mandatory header, it will go to the bypass mode and not communicate.

We did evaluate CrowdStrike Falcon and Microsoft Sentinel. These two products are fantastic. A lot of acceptable and unacceptable risks are covered in CrowdStrike Falcon. With these two solutions, the business line continues without disruption, and there's less downtime.

Carbon Black CB Defense is not compatible with many machines. Many of the machines require a minimum prerequisite. However, CrowdStrike Falcon supports even legacy machines. Around 95% of the machines in our organization are covered by Carbon Black CB Defense. However, CrowdStrike Falcon could have covered around 98.9% of machines.

The reporting system is much better in CrowdStrike Falcon, and if you want to pull data, you can customize it as per your requirements. With Carbon Black CB Defense, whatever they offer, we have to get the data. Otherwise, we have to use the API. Even if you use the API, you can only find specific information.

The engineering team needs to understand in detail the behavior of the environment, and they have to give us the solution according to that. A lot of issues are currently going on with the solution. Multiple issues and uncontrollable things are causing us to work till midnight. A lot of issues are coming in, and teams are putting a lot of effort into addressing them. However, we are still not able to meet the customer's expectations.

Like most companies, we don't use SCCM for security reasons. Most companies use different patch tools, but we cannot use these things for pushing the sensor. The solution should make something so that we can centrally push the sensor and install it on all machines. Such a feature will reduce a lot of human efforts.

The solution is deployed both on Public Cloud and On-premises. I would recommend Carbon Black CB Defense to other users.

Overall, I rate Carbon Black CB Defense a seven out of ten.

It has various use cases like firewalls and antivirus. It's been working great for us so far.

I found the offline scanning to be particularly useful. Compared to CrowdStrike, it had better IT capabilities and beautiful analytics. Overall, it was cost-effective too.

There is room for improvement in the support and service team. The response time could be faster. That's why I switched because the support was not as expected from a company like Carbon Black.

I have been working with this solution for three years. I am using the latest version. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten. It was very stable.

The scalability of the solution is good and affordable. I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. There are over 300 users in our company using the solution. 

The customer service and support team took too long to respond to our queries, and the local reseller did his best, but it still wasn't fast enough or knowledgeable enough. It was just too slow in addressing our concerns. Unfortunately, the support service was not up to par.

The setup was nice, but the technical aspects of the product can be challenging. It's not easy and requires someone who really knows what they're doing. Two to three people are required for the maintenance of the solution. 

Generally, the deployment process takes one to two weeks but also depends on the user's training. It's a cloud-based solution, so once you identify the IP address and add it to the user name, it will be available in the software market. This is how most cloud-based solutions work, and it's not complicated.

Once the product is stable, it works well. That's why I renewed it for three years. However, we had a big incident where we did not receive the expected support.

We have seen ROI. 

We use a yearly subscription model. It is not cheap, but it is cheaper than CrowdStrike.

I would recommend having a strict SLA with the vendor for support. It's better to buy extra support for the unit.  Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use Cyber Defense to protect our machines from all kinds of attacks. We use this solution to protect ourselves from advanced threat attacks as well as viruses and malware. We also do threat hunting with the help of CyberArk for defense solutions.

Carbon Black CB Defense has helped improve my organization by allowing us to have better data so that we can do correlation and get visibility into the alerts. Previously, we used a different solution for protecting the devices and we were not able to get enough data.

The Carbon Black CB Defense feature I found most valuable is that it gives us the ability to do log analysis as well as the current state of the environment and activity on the user machines.

I would say that the technical support team should be improved since it takes them a lot of time to provide us with support.

In the next release, I would like to see a host-based firewall.

I have been using this solution for more than a year.

I would rate the stability of this solution a seven, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would rate the scalability of this solution an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

The initial setup process was easy. It takes about four or five months to set up the solution. The deployment was done with the help of ten teams and five to six people who had full involvement during the implementation.

To the people looking to use this solution, I'd say if you want to get better visibility into an environment and see user activity or suspicious activity, then

Carbon Black CB Defense  is the right solution for you.

Overall, I would rate this solution an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

It is a default software that goes on every computer. This is antivirus endpoint protection. It's pretty simple. The standard application goes on every single machine that we deploy that is Windows based. We have it running on machines that are deployed on the cloud, machines that are deployed on-premise, and on machines that people are using strictly on the internet.

We're using the Carbon Black Endpoint. We're using the latest sensors. We've used 3.7 and 3.8.

Initially when we deployed it, there were over 2,000 users in terms of giving access to the console. We had roles created for security analysts. There were different roles. For example, the field services who take care of the PCs could go take a look. They could bypass if needed, but they could not change any roles or uninstall the agent. 

Other roles, such as mine, have full access. We had roles where we had actually created the API integration key where we were sending the Carbon Black logs to a third party who was our SIM for review. There are different roles you can define in there.

The new feature that we're deploying, the new offering from Carbon Black, is MDR, which stands for manage, detect, and response. It's the most valuable feature because Carbon Black will be continuously checking the logs, and they will be advising us on how to improve some of the policies as well as review the logs. If there are any nefarious agents or things happening on the end points, they will know. 

They also have the ability to take action based on what we've already agreed upon, what rights we give them, or what we tell them they can or can't do as part of their response. Hypothetically, if there's a rogue machine that is trying to infect other machines, we can tell them that they should try to contact us, but if they don't get a hold of anybody in GreenFirst IT in 15 minutes, they should go ahead and quarantine that machine. They can take actions, they can do remediation or response. Instead of advising, they will be taking action.

The node management could be much better. The one thing that they cannot do very easily is change the tenant from a backend. As an example, assets were sold from a company called Rayonier Advanced Materials and went to GreenFirst, which became GreenFirst as a startup. We had a tenant where all the machines were registered to the cloud. That is the tenant that was there for Rayonier. It is very hard for them to make changes to the tenants, such as rename or anything like that. What they really would push you to do is, "Your tenant is going to be under your company name. You have to uninstall all the agents and reinstall them again." Making changes at a tenant-level would be a welcome feature to allow divestitures and things like that.

They can do some of these things, but they're not very user friendly or easily done. They basically tell you to do the hard lifting yourself. For example, they basically kept pushing me and saying, "Uninstall your antivirus on about 500 machines and reinstall it with the new tenant information." I would say "No, everything is a tenant. Rename me the tenant."

I would like to see the GUI improved and easier troubleshooting. One thing they did that makes it easier in troubleshooting versus the older versions of the software is that now you can actually drill down to see the parent process and go all the way down. 

In CrowdStrike, they have a timeline where they actually build the whole scenario as to what happened. It's like a playback. It's almost like a movie. You play back and it says, "Okay, this process ran," and then it shows what it caused and everything. You can see all that and if there are any screen outputs it puts it on because CrowdStrike actually maintains some of those things. A playback feature would be very valuable.

I have worked with this solution for over three years.

Carbon Black is a very capable tool. It's a very strong product.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

It's on every single node, so I cannot increase it anymore than that.

Their technical support is better than most of the normal tech supports that I've dealt with. My one pet peeve with them is that they respond to your request on their portal. For example, if you need to have a working session with them, they respond to your request in the portal, and you are not always in the portal and you may miss a time that they would be available to assist you. It would be much better if they picked up the phone or actually emailed instead of always using their portal.

I would rate their technical support a 3.5 out of 5.

We switched because we wanted to go to a next-gen antivirus that looked at the pattern instead of looking for signature. The second thing is we were trying to get off Kaspersky because it's a Russian company and Rayonier AM was an American company. The biggest reason was to go to a next-gen antivirus.

This is hardly signature based. It's more than heuristic, and one of the other reasons is that the updates are pushed over the cloud when the nodes are available. We don't need people to be connecting to an internal server on-prem to get their updates. Another reason was security features and the ability to quarantine a machine regardless if it's on-prem or if it's just on the internet.

If you're not used to Carbon Black, it can be challenging because these are not regular rules, like the way you would deploy under a normal antivirus. There are a lot of different functionalities that you could do that are not available under normal antivirus things, such as allowing a script or an application to run based on hash, or white listing if an application is signed by a specific code sign or certificate. It can be very challenging.

When we did it years ago, we went from McAfee and Kaspersky to Carbon Black. At that time, there were 2,000 or so nodes. Deployment took less than a month. That was due to us doing various types of scripting for a massive rollout and automatic installation of the tool and the automatic uninstall of the older tools.

Deployment was done in-house.

It's very subjective to give an ROI on an antivirus. If I was making a piece of equipment and I implemented something that could show that instead of something that takes four hours to complete, now it takes three hours, I could tell you what my ROI would be.

In this instance it is very subjective. The only thing that you could do is take a look at how many security incidents you've had with a different product versus what you think you will have with going with Carbon Black, or assume you won't have any issues with Carbon Black versus how many issues you had with the other one, and then you can see how long it takes. 

Speaking from experience, for the former company that I worked for, we were hit with malware, a ransomware where some files were encrypted, but we were able to get them from the backup. However, attacks such as that have failed since we have had Carbon Black.

It is more expensive, but it's worth it. There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fee.

We looked at CrowdStrike, the offering from Blackberry called SentinelOne, and we looked at the major other AV providers like Sophos, McAfee, and Norton.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. 

Carbon Black gives a different offering. Their ThreatHunter gives you more of the threat hunting features, so if they basically make that a standard feature, then I would rate it higher.

My advice is to use a deployment tool if you have one because it will come in handy. I would also suggest that you enable the feature in Carbon Defense because uninstallation requires a key so that people can't get rid of it.

If you are going to be buying it, my advice would be to take a look at their manage, detect, and response feature because you take the onus away from your internal team, and you also take away potential misconfiguration out of your internal IT group because they will be looking at all the logs, and they will be reviewing the policies and they can actually tell you how to do it. If you do not have the manage, detect and response, it all falls on you, and then you would have to integrate it with your own. If you have a SIM, you would have to learn how to integrate it to your SIM.

Carbon Black is an EDR solution and a Next Generation AV. It works on the basis of machine learning and artificial intelligence. It's used to manage multiple endpoints from a central location and detects alerts on the basis of AI. If we have any custom alerts, they can be triggered or flagged. In that case, we can have a centralized alerting system. It can also be used to isolate, repair, or remediate a machine when it is taken by an attack.

We aren't responsible for managing the infrastructure of this particular tool. We're using it for investigation purposes and to monitor products that are being used by our clients.

It's deployed on a public cloud.

The solution has a library where we can have multiple threat intels onboarded. We just have to subscribe to a particular site intel and they'll provide us with all of the truncated details so that we can create IOCs and alerts on the basis of those IOCs. 

It's one of the best features because there are multiple third-party vendors who can provide us with site intel in one location. You just have to subscribe to them, and they'll start providing you with IOCs. If a new attack starts, you will have all the basic IOCs on that list, which can be used to identify if the same attack is happening in your environment.

We can isolate devices in just two clicks. That's also a great feature. We can remediate and repair devices from a central location. It's not too difficult to use that particular tool. The user interface is very easy to understand. You are not required to roam around the console to find where the alert went. It's easy to resolve that.

When we onboarded Carbon Black, there weren't many EDR solutions available in the market. It was one of the best tools when it was launched. We don't have any complaints with the tool. The tool is very good. It highlights many of the alerts and events.

When you're investigating an alert, you will get a graph and will see the details related to the process that triggered the alert. Below the graph, there are network connections, file modifications, industry modifications, and multiple other activities. If you want to specifically find which additional modification has been performed, you will have to find the log you're searching for. There isn't a search bar to check for file modifications or network connections. In that case, you don't have a search bar, so you have to check each and every event, which could be more than 1,000.

You would have to check 1,000 events manually, or you would have to export sheets to view what you are searching for. If they added a search bar, it would reduce the time it takes to do investigations.

If you want to log into a device, there's a process named winlogon.exe, which is supposed to be initiated. If I'm using Carbon Black, I will have to check where winlogon.exe is being observed or at what time it was being observed. Because there's no search bar, I will have to check for the event in all the device events.

A search bar in the investigation page and some AI-related tasks like outgoing alerts, or recent tactics that are being used in the market, must be embedded in the tool so that it's easier to find alerts. The AI must be stronger so it can identify activity that is actually malicious.

I have used this solution for a year and a half.

It's a stable product.

It's scalable because it's based on the cloud.

It's sensor-based, so you have to install the machine associated with your application. You will have the configuration file and the agent installation file. You'll have to run the configuration file, and then you'll be onboarded to Carbon Black. It's easy.

Deployment was fast. It took 15 minutes.

We have a group of about eight people for maintenance and supervision.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.

It's a good tool, but it requires some updates. It doesn't have new features like multi-tactics, which other EDR products are providing.

My advice is to acknowledge or resolve a particular alert because once they resolve, it will be very difficult for you to find that alert. Handle it with care because with just a click, the device will be isolated. It could be a server, host, or network device. If you click the wrong button out of curiosity, it will destroy the machine. It has multiple accesses and won't ask if you're sure if you want to do an activity or not.

We're providing this product to our customers. The main intention of using this product is to detect small malware and for vulnerabilities and scanning detection in real-time.

The Intel fit was very extensive and comprehensive enough. The visualization tree product feature in this CB defense is quite good. These are the two more notable product features.

The pricing is excellent.

The solution is stable.

There's some disparity between the on-premise and the cloud type of application. We basically manage applications versus SaaS-based ones. We were hoping that some of the more advanced features that they offer in the SaaS actually could be similarly offered for the on-premise managed applications. We find that cloud-based solutions are particularly more advanced in product roadmaps compared to on-prem.

There should be more roles in support. There needs to be support for multi-tenancy, the likes of multiple names space. When you use that in a very large organization, you have many departments. It doesn't really provide grouping by department, et cetera. 

There's actually a lagging feature that we saw in the SaaS, yet not on the on-premise setup. It seems like the on-premise one was really, really meant for a single department setup rather than for multiple departments.

The solution doesn't allow for high availability configuration. That's also a negative impact relating to the product.

We have been using this solution for about two years.

Stability-wise, the product has been quite stable. There's no issue. The maintenance was quite straightforward, and if you don't really touch it, you won't have stability problems. 

Medium to large companies will be selecting Carbon Black solutions mainly due to the fact that they needed this to better the security posture checks in the environment, typically in the more regulated environment. Regulatory, regulated environments or companies that are more security-centric will go for this type of product.

While it can scale, it only supports non-HA. Scalability is quite limited. You can only scale vertically - not horizontally.

Technical support can be much improved. They're quite lagged in terms of their support and post-sales. In terms of the roadmap to sell, they tend to sell more towards endpoints and very large enterprises. For a server base, it would lose itself. That's not really their main focus at this point in time. Therefore, it's not as good there.

Neutral

I'm also familiar with Trend Micro. Trend Micro is advancing the product, keeping it fairly up to date, and covering some aspects of the EDR over time and they're doing a lot of catching up. They actually have caught up. The technology now is quite fairly similar - it's just that the initial focus was in different areas, however, they are filling this gap. It's actually a very strong competitor. In terms of user, features-wise, et cetera, this solution is quite on par. Trend Micro is a security-focused company, so from an enterprise point, probably they are more focused than Carbon Black nowadays being bought over by VMware. Security is probably not their main area of focus at this point in time. 

The initial setup is a bit of a mix. It is simple in the sense the setup was quite straightforward, however, when it comes to configuring for other supports, like emails, notifications, Syslog, et cetera, this identity provider's power integration, which we did for our SML 2.0, is powered based, rather than supported directly through the GUI. That was not so user-friendly, or more complex in terms of configuration.

On a scale from one to five in terms of ease of setup, it'll be about three. It probably takes about half a day just to complete the configuration setup.

The maintenance so far has been quite fairly straightforward. We don't really have any issues with the maintenance. Obviously, I didn't want the downside of the product side, maybe one of the cons is that it doesn't really support HA high availability setup configuration. 

We have a contract, we have actually a BOT tender contract where our different customers from different departments actually purchase their licensing. Generally, the pricing is from a unique cost perspective. I wouldn't know exactly how much they buy typically, as they procure their licenses on their own. Typically, if you compared the pricing to Trend Micro, it's probably about half the cost.

We're not quite a partner. We are a systems integrator and reseller. 

We do not have the latest update. We integrate that into our Azure AD itself.

We have the solution deployed both on the cloud and on-premises. 

I'd recommend the solution based on the cost. It's really subjective to the organization's needs. If it's for a single, small department, it's fine. If it's for a large organization itself, some of it lacks. Enterprise capabilities are probably a hindrance for a large organization to take up such a product. The limitations of supporting multiple departments with different roles and users, for them to configure what they need, would be a problem. When you talk about alerts et cetera, and also certain tracks, different departments actually probably they have their own different needs, so they wanted something to be a little bit independent, where the configuration settings are unique to the department, rather than something that can only be common for all departments in the current setup.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten.