What is our primary use case?
We were searching for a tool in the market that would allow us to automate our vulnerability management processes. We found Vulcan Cyber to be the best one, at least for our company, for automating different tasks involved in vulnerability management. We not only have a centralized place where we can find all the vulnerabilities and assets. We also have an easy way to automate the creation of tickets for different owners of the assets and other things.
How has it helped my organization?
It is very important for us that Vulcan Cyber offers a single pane of glass for centralizing our security data. It was one of the most important topics for us when we were searching for this kind of tool. We wanted a single pane of glass to see all our assets in the company as well as all the vulnerabilities, not only from a single scanner but from different security scanners that we use in the company.
Vulcan Cyber is very good for collecting our organization’s risk signals from multiple tools and attack surfaces into a single data lake. It is able to ingest information from different sources. They also have some capabilities to deduplicate data that is already in different sources. When you see it in their platform, in their data lake as they call it, you see it as a single entry instead of having duplicates all over the place.
Vulcan Cyber has had a great impact because previously, we had to review the vulnerabilities manually before going ahead and communicating them to the different owners. Now, with the automation that Vulcan Cyber provides, it is very easy for us to see exactly what is the risk of a vulnerability, not only by the CVSS score, but also depending on if the vulnerability is currently exploited in the wild, or if there are exploits that are publicly available that can be used by anyone. All of those tasks are automated by Vulcan in the backend. We see a summary of the vulnerability, so we know whether it is very critical for us because it is affecting some of our assets. It could also be floating in the wild, so we need to take care of it immediately, or it might not be as critical as we thought initially. It might be classified as a high-risk vulnerability, but there is no expert available, so we have to wait a little bit longer to patch everything.
The combination of all the data that we get in the platform helps with the automation of a task. There were some decisions that we had to manually review previously. Now, with all the information provided by Vulcan in a single place for each vulnerability, it is easier for us to understand if something is really critical and needs to be patched immediately or it can wait a little bit longer until we have some spare time to patch different systems in the company.
Vulcan Cyber has helped reduce our organization’s mean time to remediation. We have the capability to open some tickets automatically for different vulnerabilities we have in the platform without having to go to different ticketing tools or business owners individually. In the company, we use different ticketing tools depending on the department, so having them all integrated inside of Vulcan is helpful. Having a single button to create tickets automatically, providing all the information already gathered by Vulcan in this ticket, and then just passing the ticket to different teams impacts the remediation.
Vulcan Cyber has, for sure, helped save costs for our organization when it comes to human hours spent to fix vulnerabilities. We do not have to manually review each vulnerability and go to the different threat intelligence sources to identify if there are any exploits or if they are being exploited in the wild by malicious threat actors. When we have all that information in the platform, we can make decisions based on the data that we already have. That saves a lot of human hours.
What is most valuable?
It is very good when it comes to ingesting information from different sources and then displaying this information in an easy-to-use platform.
What needs improvement?
We have already requested Vulcan several features. Mainly, what I would like from them is more maintenance of the different connectors they have in the platform. You can connect different sources and different security scanners to the platform, so you get all the data ingested into Vulcan, but some of these connectors are not maintained to the latest updates by different vendors. For example, if you have a new update on the Azure connector, sometimes, it does not work correctly or as expected just because Vulcan has not updated the connector from their side.
For how long have I used the solution?
It has already been about five months. We have been using it since April of this year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
So far, we have not had any crashes or loss of availability to the platform.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have around 100K assets from different sources being ingested into Vulcan every day. So far, the platform is quite smooth. I do not see any slowness or any problems with the search or the queries with the platform.
One of the best parts that we have found so far about Vulcan is the ability to ingest data from multiple sources, even if there are duplicate entries for assets and vulnerabilities. They are able to duplicate this data, so when you go to the Vulcan platform, you only see one entry for every asset and every vulnerability.
How are customer service and support?
We have contacted their technical support. They reply quite fast to the support tickets that you open, at least for the initial triage of the issues that you have. For some of the support requests, it takes them some time to fix the issues, but they communicate correctly with you all the way.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We have used other solutions. One of the most common ones is the Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management tool, but it is only for Windows machines. It is very similar to Vulcan because you can get different vulnerabilities for Windows endpoints and Windows servers. It provides information about the risks and affected assets, but it does not have the capability, for example, to automatically create tickets for different owners.
How was the initial setup?
We use the cloud deployment model. I am not sure if they have an on-premise one. They most probably only have cloud deployments, but it is nice that you can at least choose the region in which you want Vulcan to be deployed. For example, we care about data protection, so we want everything to stay in Europe, and Vulcan was able to provide that kind of cloud in the Europe area.
For most connectors or sources that we integrated with Vulcan, the integration was quite easy. It was also easy to create different users in the platform and set up different vulnerabilities and automation, but there were some connectors that were not well maintained at the time. We had some problems where we were configuring different API tokens and different credentials for those connectors.
It took about five months because we were going to go live with everyone in the company and all the departments in August. From April when we started the POV until now, it has been approximately five months.
It does not require much maintenance from our side. The connector should be updated from the Vulcan side. If there are no errors and no tokens that have expired in the integration, or there is nothing similar that requires attention, there is not much maintenance.
What about the implementation team?
We used our technical account manager and our customer success engineer from the Vulcan side but not from a third party.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Its pricing is quite fair compared to what is out there in the market, especially compared to the tool from Microsoft. It is a SaaS platform that has an annual cost, so it is something that is already used by many companies. It is quite affordable.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Vulcan was the only one that we were looking at when we did the POV with them. That was because we already had different scanners in the company. What we were looking for was a platform that would ingest all different scanners' data instead of having a new scanning platform in place.
Vulcan Cyber has been quite good so far for mitigating cyber risks. It provides a lot of insightful data about our environment. We have a single place to go when we want to look for our assets. It is like an asset inventory. We can also see different vulnerabilities that we have in the company. It is very useful to see what our security posture rating is, for example, to understand the level of security we have in the company. It is also very easy to see which vulnerabilities or patches we need to apply to be able to increase the security posture rating quite easily.
What other advice do I have?
To a colleague who needs a vulnerability risk management solution but is considering a DIY approach, I would say that the effort needed to implement something similar to Vulcan is not worth it when you have this kind of tool in the market, especially when you know that they offer a lot of different innovations for automation. They can help reduce the cost of person-hours that you spend with your team working on solving or patching different assets. You can use those hours or that effort to increase the patching talents in your company or create better policies for patching.
I would rate Vulcan Cyber a nine out of ten.
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.