Veriato 360

Veriato 360 (which begins at $90 per endpoint) is a veteran employee monitoring tool for collecting actionable user and employee behavior data and generating analytics. The software is broken into two products: Veriato 360 and Veriato Recon. Together they make up a suite of monitoring, insider threat detection, and incident response tools for scanning and responding to online communications and employee activities within your network. While Veriato 360's overall usability and feature set compare favorably with other heavy duty monitoring options, such as Editors' Choice Teramind, its lack of a cloud-based deployment option in 2017 is unfortunate. This makes it difficult for us to recommend Veriato 360 to any organization that's not prepared to install the software on-premises using SQL Server.

Pricing and Setup

Veriato 360 begins at $90 per endpoint for Veriato 360 and costs an additional $24 per endpoint for Veriato Recon. Veriato, Inc. does not publish full pricing information and prices by custom enterprise quote. However, Veriato told PCMag that it offers volume discounts as endpoints scale up, as well as discounts for nonprofit and government organizations. According to the company, the software is deployed in more than 3,000 enterprise organizations in over 110 countries. The primary industries that use it include defense contractors and enterprises in the technology, finance, and health sectors.

Veriato 360 must be installed on a 64-bit Windows operating system (OS) running either Windows 10 ( at Amazon) with Windows Server 2012 or Server 2016, or Windows 7 using a separate server for SQL Server 2016. The product also requires 40 GB minimum of free disk space or more for ongoing data collection as no data is stored in the cloud. Veriato recommends a Quick Install with SQL Server Express 2016 for the database for customers with fewer than 100 client endpoints to monitor.

Once the Veriato Management Console is installed and activated on your administrator machine you can install agents to monitor employee machines, which is an easier process than installing the initial console. As long as the computer is managed by IT and connected to the company network, you can schedule remote installs of Test Recorders (if you're using a trial account), organize machines into groups, and begin monitoring. These Client Recorder settings let a business push the software out and set individual or group recording policies for different company machines or users. The monitoring agent is always hidden; you can't switch the visibility on and off as you can with InterGuard and Teramind. Veriato says this is to prevent the user from Googling the file name and realizing they're being monitored. However, admins can change the incognito file name to anything they want, such "Veriato 360" if the business wants to be transparent about its employee monitoring.

For my testing, the company provisioned a test server and provided me with a login to the Veriato Management Console through a cloud instance. Therefore, we did not set up an on-premises SQL Server for the purposes of this review. However, this is not an option available to customers. Veriato said it is working on a cloud-based version of its software hosted by Amazon Web Services ($6,415.00 at Amazon) (AWS) but currently the platform requires SQL or SQL Express.

Veriato was founded in 1998. It has updated its feature set and user interface (UI) considerably to offer a modern, responsive dashboard that's far superior to the old clunky UI of fellow veteran platform InterGuard (8.00 Per User Per Month at InterGuard) . But relying on an archaic network configuration and on-premises servers in 2017 is a huge knock against the otherwise-modern enterprise software. We hope the company addresses this in 2018 by offering a cloud-based option, whether it's through a third-party cloud infrastructure provider such as AWS or through its own cloud hosting. But, for now, it's a major detractor for any customers besides large enterprise that can handle the on-premises deployment.

Employee Monitoring

Once you get past the on-premises installation, the Veriato Management Console offers a wealth of monitoring features and is easy to navigate. The primary features I tested in Veriato 360 are data collection and monitoring, screen capture and activity logs, and the ability to build customized alerts and reports based on actions such as keywords, logins, application usage, and file transfers. The Veriato Recon dashboard within the same UI adds anomaly reporting and keyword tracking for insider threat detection.

Veriato monitors a number of data sources, including website and app surfing and usage, keystrokes typed, file transfers, document tracking, search monitoring, and network usage. It can also monitor emails received and sent as well as any chats or instant messages (IMs) from a number of supported apps. The breadth of monitoring data in Veriato 360 isn't as extensive as in InterGuard or Teramind, particularly where social apps and live optical character recognition (OCR) screen monitoring are concerned. But all of the primary monitoring bases are covered. Supported chat apps include Cisco Jabber, Skype, and Skype for Business , and older and open-source chat apps such as ICQ 7, IRC, Trillian, and XMPP-SPARK. The company also said it supports WhatsApp.

The management console, which has recently been redesigned, is a clean, responsive UI with a straightforward, left-hand navigation menu that breaks down the major functionality. Tabs include ones for Recon Dashboard, 360 Dashboard, Data Explorer, Reports, Categories, Recorders (installed agents), Users, Alerts & Policies, Configuration, and System Management.

Both dashboards are customizable and give you good-looking data visualizations for an overview of Veriato Recon and Veriato 360 activity. The Recon Dashboard lets you sort users into different Behavioral Groups, which automatically group users based on similar activity after 20-30 days of data, updating weekly to show activity changes over time. You can also sort groups by department within your organization, and Veriato 360 integrates with Active Directory (AD) as well. After clicking the Settings gear on the top right-hand side, I also found options to send a weekly behavior group report and change the color schemes.

The Recon Dashboard is also where you set the criteria for behavioral anomalies and view anomaly reports, as well as set Recon keywords to track in all of your monitoring data sources. You can set up anomaly reports for specific devices, users, or categories (set in the Categories tab, broken down into app, device, keyword, time, or website filters), whereas the Recon Keywords tab sets up targeted tracking of specific words and phrases. When I clicked Keyword Alert Events, a pop-up appeared that let me set a tracked keyword on specific devices, groups, categories, or users, as well as choose criteria such as partial matches and whether Veriato 360 should scan both URLs and text in captions, chats, documents, emails, HTML, keystrokes, and other apps.

So, in a Skype message, for instance, Veriato 360 monitors keywords in the chat message itself, cross-referenced with keystroke log data and timestamped screenshots for the full context and audit trail around a user action, narrowed down by a specific timeframe or search parameter. You can get pretty detailed with keyword alerts, but Teramind and the Alert Words in InterGuard both let you layer more automation on top.

The various views provided in the 360 Dashboard tab provide much more of a traditional widget-based layout of various interactive charts and graphs. This tab of the console opens a scrolling list of more than two dozen different dashboards broken down by data type. Clicking through the list, I found dashboards for keyword and event alerts, various communication types (chat, email), document and file tracking, keystrokes and productivity, security dashboards, and even more specialized views of metrics such as potential Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) violations and an Employee Flight Risk dashboard. The Flight Risk Dashboard was a particularly unique interactive report showing employees who viewed job websites such as CareerBuilder, Indeed, and Monster broken down into bar graphs. All of these widget-based dashboards can be customized with drag-and-drop or by using Veriato's Chart Builder to add a custom visualization. Overall, Veriato 360's widget-based visualization dashboards were more dynamic than InterGuard's but not quite as responsive or full of real-time data as Teramind's.

For a more targeted way to view monitoring data and save searches, the Data Explorer tab can add "Forms" to show one type of activity or be sorted into folders with other forms. So, if you wanted to create a view solely showing online search events or file transfers, then you can add a form to the Activity Types list or mark it to show up in the Favorites list for specific queries. The Reports tab works similarly, except instead of a static form view, it opens the Report Builder to configure and send out reports on about 20 different data types, including app usage, call activity, emails, and productivity. There are useful metrics here such as User Status which, in a setting such as a call center, is useful for tracking what an agent is doing.

I tested the report builder by setting up a new Anomaly Alert (another one of the report parameters) and going through the Report Wizard process. For the report type, you can choose between a quick view, aggregate report, detailed report, or user summary report. The report builder is one of the most dynamic features in Veriato. As I moved through the steps, I found that, depending on the data type I chose—apps, document tracking, network tracking, etc.—Veriato lets you select a Report Grouping and select a file path by which you want to group the fields in the report. You can also move the field you want to include in the report back and forth in the next step. This level of granular data group control is something I didn't find in any other tool.

That sort of detailed grouping also extends to how Veriato manages recorders, users, and monitoring policies. You can group policies together or have different ones for various users and clients, and specific recording or geofencing policies for users or groups to track physical location. Geofencing only works for desktops and some versions of Android at the moment, but can be used to track remote employee locations, stolen laptops, etc. For instance, in the Recorders tab, groups were broken down by department and status including Engineers, Executives, Finance, HR, Legal, Sales, etc. This is also important for user privacy as it lets admins configure access rights so a manager only sees the monitoring data for employees they're directly overseeing.

Document and file tracking are also worth mentioning. Veriato 360 records the full file path of a document or file when it moves, as well as which users are transferring, downloading, or uploading the most files, including potentially malicious files. This also extends to any printed documents, email attachments, files transferred to removable drives, or uploaded to cloud storage services. Keyword tracking works on documents as well but only on the file name. Unlike Teramind, Veriato 360 can't run full OCR on a document PDF or image to analyze the text.

Finally, Veriato 360 is extremely powerful when it comes to screenshots and screen capture. The tool lets you set screenshots at specific intervals, but beyond that, provides a mountain of associated information as well as a historical playback mode. When you go into the Users tab and choose a particular group or department, Veriato 360 lists all of the employees in a given group, with detail options to view all recorded data associated with them. This data includes apps and user status to keyword alerts and screenshots. I went into the Marketing department and chose an employee's screenshots. This launched me into a powerful Events dashboard that broke down every single user action, including columns for active time and focus time, any associated URLs or apps, and screen snapshots for each timestamped entry.

After clicking on View Screen Snapshots, I could either tab through screens as the user interacted with their machine, or press the Play button in the screen capture viewer to enter a historical playback mode and watch the employee go about their day—chatting on Skype, uploading files to Dropbox, scrolling through their Facebook feed—playing out as if I was quickly turning the pages in a flipbook of that marketing employee's activity. The screen capture viewer itself had native tools, such as the ability to save screens manually or see associated keystroke data. Overall, the features were extremely powerful (and more than a little scary as I watched an employee's every move), though unlike Teramind, you can't jump directly into a live feed of an employee's real-time screen.

Extensive, On-Premises Oversight

Veriato 360 is a mature employee monitoring platform and it shows. The software's comprehensive data gathering tools, customized reporting and alert builders, keyword tracking, and insider threat-focused anomaly detection and automated incident response make it a powerful Big Brother-like tool for enterprises. The detailed reporting in the 360 Dashboard views, in particular, as well as Veriato 360's screen capture viewer, gives admins the tools to see and analyze absolutely everything employees are doing on company machines. In that light, it's important to make use of Veriato 360's granular policy customization, user groups, and data collection attributes to maintain as much employee privacy as is possible with these kinds of tools.

Overall, Veriato 360 is easy to use, feature-packed and, along with InterGuard and Teramind, can be downright draconian in the level of oversight it provides. While the lack of a cloud-based option is a major detractor, and Veriato 360 doesn't offer the same level of advanced functionality and in-depth monitoring as Editors' Choice Teramind, it's a more than worthwhile choice for enterprises looking to monitor employees on-premises.

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