Security sophistication informs NFR Sentivist

Product: Sentivist Smart Sensor ES1000

www.nfr.com

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Company: NFR Security

Product: Sentivist Smart Sensor ES1000

www.nfr.com

A strong and deep-rooted heritage in the world of the ultrasophisticated network and security analyst colors every aspect of this product. If you have the time, resources, and interest to take a microscope to your network, then NFR Sentivist is the clear choice. Turning such a powerful analysis tool into an IPS does raise some though, as the Sentivist is almost too configurable and too controllable.

The strength of product – which lies in its capture-and-analysis tools – is also balanced by relative weakness in reporting and alerting.  Most of these can be worked around by someone with expertise in Unix, but Sentivist is far from an “out of the box” IPS for someone short on time and interest.

In terms of performance, NFR’s Sentivist turned in relatively modest numbers. In the single-port-pair tests, it put up excellent latency numbers under attack – better, in fact, than some other sensors’ numbers with no attacks. But latency shot way up under heaviest attack.This might be because of a hardware setting that NFR told us about after testing concluded.

< Previous: Forinet's FortiGate | Next: Pricy TippingPoint pushes >

Read more about security in Network World's Security section.