השוואה מול פתרונות ניטור והקלטה אחרים

רישוי ותמחור
רישוי צף
תמיכה חינם במסד נתונים Open Source
תמיכה במסד נתונים מסוג Commercial
Non-persistent VDI monitoring
סך כל עלות	$	$$$	$$	$$

There are several popular licensing schemes for insider threat software: per-user, per-session, per-host, a fixed infrastructure fee, and combinations thereof. 

The most common licensing schemes for insider threat solutions are based only on the number of hosts, making the pricing transparent and helping you optimize costs. Products with complicated multi-factor licensing may sometimes have hidden costs as well as additional features included by default.

Another useful option is support for floating endpoint licenses, allowing you to reassign licenses between endpoints. This is especially useful if you have a lot of virtual machines to monitor. While Ekran System includes this option for both physical and virtual machines, you’ll find it hard to quickly reassign licenses for ObserveIT and Veriato.

Monitored Platforms

Feature
Monitored Platforms
Windows XP / Server 2003
Windows Vista through Windows 10 / Server 2019
Linux / Unix (Telnet and Console sessions)
X Window sessions

Determine what endpoints and platforms you need to surveil when choosing activity monitoring software. Keep in mind that you might need a wider choice of platforms as your company grows.

All the solutions we’ve compared support Windows. Ekran System and ObserveIT also monitor sessions on Linux/Unix systems. Ekran is the only product supporting X Window session monitoring, which allows you to monitor Ubuntu Amazon Linux Workspaces.

Another important challenge is monitoring virtual environments like Citrix, Microsoft Hyper-V, and VMware Horizon. Functionality for monitoring these environments should be identical to that for monitoring physical endpoints. For virtual desktop environments, it’s best to use monitoring solutions that support floating licenses for native endpoints, as virtual machines are created more frequently than physical ones. 

To floating endpoint licenses, Ekran System delivers a client ready to be added to the golden image and automates license provisioning via the license pool. As a virtual machine instance is shut down, the license is released and returns to the pool. Therefore, to audit VMware or Citrix desktop environments, you need only the number of Ekran System Workstation licenses corresponding to the maximum number of simultaneously active virtual desktops. Also, Ekran System floating licenses support non-persistent VDI monitoring. 

At the same time, Ekran System delivers comprehensive functionality to monitor and audit published application sessions. Teramind and ObserveIT also support published application infrastructures.

Deployment & Management

Feature
Deployment & Management
Deployment model	On-premises	On-premises	On-premises	SaaS and on-premises
Easy deployment
Remote installation/uninstallation of clients
Management via web console
Centralized endpoint client updates
System health monitoring
Easy on-premises maintenance
Database cleanup
History archiving

A Software as a Service (SaaS) solution is fast to deploy and available on any platform and device. Teramind provides its service primarily according to the SaaS model. They also offer user activity monitoring and data loss prevention solutions on the AWS platform according to the Platform as a Service (PaaS) model.

However, on-premises deployment is associated with fewer security risks. On-premises deployment provides these benefits to Ekran System clients:

• A one-time license for Ekran System includes system installation and configuration.
• Ekran can be deployed on a dedicated server or in a client’s personal cloud.
• Cloud storage resources are estimated by deployment team according to business needs.
• Clients retain complete control over data protection and data access.
• Highly sensitive information remains confidential.
• Ekran ensures compliance with industry and government regulations.

Some reviewers point out that ObserveIT and Veriato are hard to deploy by yourself. You may also face scalability issues with large deployments, as these products impact server performance. Customers of Ekran System, on the other hand, praise the detailed technical documentation and easy deployment process along with the many automated maintenance tasks.

Basic Recording and Incident Response Functionality

Feature
Basic Recording and Incident Response Functionality
Video replay of every session
Audio recording
Real-time playback of live sessions
Multi-monitor recording
Real-time alerts
User behavior analytics and risk scoring
Multi-tenancy
Privileged account management
USB device alerting and blocking
Mass storage device control
Kill process on alert / block user on alert
User blocking

Recording is a key functionality of any user monitoring software. Almost all employee monitoring solutions are equipped with real-time alerting functionality: the software notifies a security officer if something suspicious is happening. Ekran System and Teramind also allow security officers to kill this activity and block the user and allow for recording audio in addition to the usual video logs.

Storing records requires plenty of disk space or cloud storage space. To use this space effectively, monitoring platforms use various compression techniques. Ekran System provides two options: to save records with the original screen resolution or compress them. Ekran’s compression algorithms allow for saving the master image and its deltas, thus reducing the amount of required disk space. Additionally, all screenshots are encrypted with a session key and the data structure of records is optimized to ensure fast insertion and deletion of records with any number of active sessions.

ObserveIT divides a user’s screen into nine parts and stores those records independently. This approach allows ObserveIT not to duplicate parts of records. For instance, when a user activity is located in one part of the screen, there’s no need to record the rest of it. On the other hand, this system makes it hard to delete, transfer, or archive data because many records may refer to a single screenshot.

Veriato compresses screen records and stores them in a default format. Teramind saves video streams, compresses them, and changes the screen resolution.

Multi-tenancy is a useful feature for managed service providers who take care of cybersecurity for their clients. It’s also useful for organizations with offices in different locations. The Ekran System multi-tenant deployment mode ensures that several independent tenants can operate in one environment.

Ekran’s alert system includes an Artificial Intelligence (AI) module that detects abnormal user activity and possible account compromise by establishing baseline user behavior and monitoring behavior in real time. For instance, this module can create a baseline of a user’s work hours and notify a security officer in case of user activity at an abnormal time.

ObserveIT employs user behavior analytics to gather statistics for the main dashboard. It provides a security officer with information on risk scores and user behavior trends over periods of time, but it doesn’t notify of suspicious trends.

Veriato offers user behavior analytics and risk scoring functionality to analyze regular user actions, establish a baseline of safe behavior, and notify designated personnel of dubious activity. But keep in mind that Veriato offers this functionality as standalone software that requires an additional license. 

Veriato also uses AI to analyze employee correspondence and daily activities for sentiment-based threat detection.

Additional Recording Features

Feature
Additional recording features:
Keylogging
Clipboard
Index by active window title
Index by active application name
Host name
User name
Date/time
Visited URLs
IP associated with host
IP of remote desktop
Logging all USB device connections
File activity monitoring
Logging USB mass storage connections
Magnifier option (zoom screenshot regions)

In order to thoroughly monitor user activity, you need more than a video of the session. Additional data helps you understand the context and search more effectively. If an insider attack has already happened, this data allows you to investigate the scope of the breach, the tools used, and the parties involved.

Advanced user monitoring solutions like Ekran System perform keylogging, record clipboard contents, and log details of active processes and applications, web activities, and device connections. They also record in-depth network details upon connecting to a host. While differing in the user activity details — and especially in the network connection details — they provide, ObserveIT, Veriato, Ekran System, and Teramind all support file activity monitoring.

Searching, Reporting, and Exporting

Feature
Searching, Reporting, and Exporting
Search by metadata
Scheduled and ad-hoc reports
Interactive system dashboards
Save sessions in encrypted format (forensic)
Export screenshots to external formats
Put your company name on reports and notifications

Recording lots of metadata is only part of the insider threat prevention process. To effectively prevent threats, you need to be able to search within collected data. It’s hard to find a single event, especially if you don’t know when it happened and your company employs thousands of people. That’s why all top monitoring solutions allow you to search by any recorded parameter.

Accumulated data can also be used for generating reports. Usually, activity monitoring software can create various scheduled and ad-hoc reports. Ekran System allows you to customize emails and reports with your company’s name and logo.

Finally, monitoring information can be used for investigations and forensic activities. Ekran System, ObserveIT, Veriato, and Teramind export recorded data in an encrypted tamper-proof format that may be used for forensic purposes.

Access Management

Feature
Access Management
Secondary authentication to identify users of shared and built-in accounts				(cloud-based system)
Access request functionality
One-time passwords
Multi-factor authentication
Time-based user access restrictions
Privileged account and session management (PASM)
Password sharing

Access management functionality controls which users have permission to work with certain data. It’s especially useful when working with privileged users and third-party vendors.

Tools such as secondary and multi-factor authentication allow you to positively identify a person trying to log in to your system. These tools are commonly used to authenticate users of shared profiles such as “admin” and “root.”

In order to protect the most sensitive data, some solutions offer one-time passwords as well as access request and workflow approval capabilities.

Ekran System has the most robust access management functionality among the top insider threat security solutions.

Solution Work and Security

Feature
Solution Work and Security
Watchdog mechanism
Driver-level uninstall protection
Centralized endpoint client updates
Audit trail for system users
SIEM system integration
Ticketing system integration

Employee monitoring software should be easy to use, protected, and compatible with the other security solutions a company uses. This is especially important for large enterprises that build custom security systems using several compatible solutions.

Recording and storing data requires a lot of disk space. If your company has thousands of employees, you may end up with terabytes of surveillance records each week. An insider attack can go unseen for months, so it’s a common requirement to preserve data for a considerable amount of time. This may be a problem with some solutions, such as Veriato, that use a lot of resources for data storage, thereby impacting server performance.

Ekran System uses highly optimized formats to store session recordings and metadata. It also optimizes bandwidth use.

Integration with SIEM and ticketing systems allows you to exchange data inside your security infrastructure. By combining information from these systems, you can trace not only the details of user actions but the reasons for them. All the monitoring solutions we’ve mentioned integrate with some set of popular SIEM systems, and several also integrate with ticketing systems.

Bottom line: Ekran System is a proven alternative to ObserveIT. It provides the same monitoring and alerting functionality while offering robust identity and access management capabilities, device management, and incident response tools. In addition to recording video, audio, and metadata, Ekran System uses a UEBA module to analyze this data and detect suspicious activity. Coupling these features with granular access and identity management, this all-in-one solution ensures full-cycle insider threat management. Ekran System offers a flexible licensing scheme, with floating endpoint licensing and with licensing for the Standard Edition based only on the number of endpoints.