UMass

Case Study

University of
Massachusetts

University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) is one of the top public universities in the United States. The flag ship Amherst campus currently enrolls over 30,500 undergraduate and graduate students, and employs 1,300 full-time faculty. This translates into over 9,000 computer workstations and over 300 servers (excluding cloud servers), generating an immense amount of data, all of which needs reliable and efficient protection.

University of Massachusetts needed to find a solution that would allow them to properly process and analyze the amount of data generated, but also to find a solution that wasn’t prohibitively expensive.

Prior to adopting SIEMonster’s solution, they had tried several other Gartner Quadrantranked SIEM solutions, none of which were able to meet their needs, and none for a reasonable price. Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at University of Massachusetts, Mr Dalton, explains that “in our existing SIEM we couldn’t get all the data we wanted into it, mostly because of licensing costs.”

“Our events per second were making all of them exorbitantly expensive, because they charge by EPS and tiering. We found that just four data sources or less would put us in their top tier already. Just our network flow traffic tops 200,000 EPS.” The security team at University of Massachusetts was facing the same problems millions of other companies do, including:
Event Per Second (EPS) limits.

Their prior solutions didn’t allow them to monitor every data source due to EPS limits, leaving themselves vulnerable to attacks and hacks.

Exorbitant pricing models.
By charging excessively for their solutions, our competitors force customers to cut corners and leave data sources unprotected.
Long installation times.
The majority of SIEM solutions require weeks, if not months to fully install, and need ongoing maintenance.
Inconvenient and cumbersome interfaces.
In struggling to read and analyze the data collected, the security team risked missing potential threats

SIEMonster provided the University of Massachusetts with its cutting-edge SIEMonster running on AWS managed services offers affordable and infinitely scalable SIEM solutions with the most efficient and cutting-edge platform on the market. Thanks to SIEMonster’s solution and AWS, the University of Massachusetts is now able to effectively and efficiently manage and secure their data for a fraction of the price they paid for a competitor’s solution.
Affordable pricing
SIEMonster CISO, Chris Rock, recounts how customers like the University of Massachusetts have approached him for a solution time and time again, because

“they were being penalized by competitors for having large EPS rates but didn’t have the budgets to go with it”. SIEMonster boasts low set prices and doesn’t have any hidden costs.

He explains that “This is exactly why we built SIEMonster, so it could be used by small, medium and large customers without being penalized on storage or event pricing.”

High eps rates
SIEMonster doesn’t believe in data caps and can easily handle 500,000+ EPS. SIEMonster is infinitely scalable thanks to AWS managed auto scaling solutions including Open Search, Managed Kafka and Kubernetes. 

Siemonster evolves with you
SIEMonster prides itself on its ability to adapt and fit their customer’s needs. The University of Massachusetts, who initially signed up with SIEMonster for one year, have now signed a 3-year contract and are now considering expanding their data ingestion to include things like physical door entry monitoring. They are also expanding their human based behavior and machine learning alerting systems. This is possible using AWS technologies. there is no need for upgrades or scaling out. It is all done automatically using AWS technologies and is available in 20+ AWS regions.