Veriato Cerebral

Like many players in the employee monitoring and time tracking categories, Veriato Cerebral, which begins at $95 per person for a minimum of 50 person deployment, has experienced a recent surge in interest and engagements from companies dealing with the sudden, new remote work reality happening due to the coronavirus pandemic. Cerebral's multi-point approach offers businesses visibility into the online and communications activity of employees and contractors. Cerebral, which replaces Veriato 360, combines multi-point tracking with proactive artificial intelligence (AI), risk assessment methodology, and insider-threat detection. All of which earns it a well-deserved Editors' Choice award along with fellow monitoring competitor, Teramind.

What Veriato Cerebral brings to the table is detailed, accurate, and actionable data for use in incident response, high-risk insider monitoring, and productivity reporting. Cerebral can be deployed on-premises, in the cloud, or through a managed services provider (MSP). Framed as an insider threat detection solution, Veriato Cerebral’s agents watch every endpoint while looking out for any leaks or suspicious patterns in user behavior. Integrated AI proactively seeks out threats and anomalies and sets off alerts. More importantly, Veriato Cerebral can be used to track data within an organization and block it from being shared externally.

The solution can also track files and documents in a variety of locations, including those saved to external drives, sent through personal email accounts, printed out, or uploaded to unknown servers. This kind of security tracking inevitably encompasses employee monitoring. When we looked at it last, Veriato’s two separate offerings were Veriato 360 and Veriato Recon. Veriato 360 was the monitoring solution with the screenshot capture and tracking while Veriato Recon focused on behavior analytics. Both products worked in conjunction with each other but have since been integrated to form Veriato Cerebral.

Pricing and Setup

Veriato Cerebral will run you $95 per person for a minimum of 50 person deployment, which doesn't make it the cheapest monitoring or time tracking solution we reviewed. Additionally, Veriato doesn't publish full pricing information on its site, so you'll need to contact the company for a 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.

On-prem instances of Veriato must be installed on a 64-bit Windows operating system (OS) running either Windows 10 with Windows Server 2012 or Server 2016, or Windows 7 using a separate server for SQL Server 2016. The product also requires 40 gigabytes (GB) minimum of free disk space or more for ongoing data collection. Veriato recommends a Quick Install which will also setup SQL Server Express 2016 as the default database for customers with fewer than 100 client endpoints they need to monitor.

Compared to when we tested Veriato's earlier software entries, the company has refined Cerebral's feature set and user interface (UI) considerably to offer a modern, responsive dashboard that's far superior to many of the older and even somewhat clunkier UIs we saw in some competitors, notably InterGuard. 

Getting started with the service requires users to activate their licenses (which will come as a key in their purchase emails). A license can be applied to various devices depending on the selected deployment subscription.

The second step is adding Recorders to networked devices which is simplified thanks to a wizard that helps step-by-step installation. As soon as it starts, the wizard begins scanning for unrecorded devices using Active Directory or Network Discovery. Scanning may require special permission on your network. Also consider that Recorder installations require a device to restart, so installation can be set to a time when users are not active. Once added, Recorders begin capturing data and light up the Dashboards of Recon and 360 in the event of any potential risks.

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.

A Multi-Point Threat Detection Solution

For 2020, Veriato Cerebral is more than just an integrated employee tracking and insider threat detection solution. It now applies AI to study patterns as well as risk scoring dashboards to protect against potential insider data breaches. This lets it help businesses lock down possible theft and avoid data loss. Applying analysis and psycholinguistics and natural language processing, Veriato Cerebral can gauge employee engagement and determine clues from written emails and other office communication. whether or not they are dissatisfied with their work situation. Understanding that employees who become disgruntled or adversarial towards a company might potentially act against their employers gives Veriato's AI the ability to delineate threats and clamp down on potential risks.

Some examples of this are sudden verbal outbursts in conversations, the use of certain words (i.e. referring to one's company as 'them' instead of the more inclusive 'us' or 'we'.) could be signs of growing employee dissatisfaction. Other activities that set off red flags within Cerebral's monitoring enclave could be the downloading and saving, or printing, of valuable company information.

Veriato Cerebral leapfrogs competing employee monitoring solutions that may record screenshots, track employee activity, and yield rudimentary analytics. Cerebral can serve as a multi-point threat-detection solution capable of gleaning useful data from certain keywords, employees accessing unusual servers, erratic behavior patterns in emails and group messaging, and employee sentiment to assess risk. This may not be a big consideration for small, tightly-knit business units, but can be a considerable benefit to larger organizations with hundreds or thousands of remotely-located employees.

Built for larger scale deployments, Veriato Cerebral's advantage is that it can condense vast amounts of employee monitoring data and run its risk assessment AI. Administrators and managers can simply start their day looking at their Cerebral dashboard and focusing on the employees that ring up alerts in their risk score, and from there, drill down into what those threat vectors are to see if they pose any real danger or if they can be cleared because of false positives. Either way, Cerebral is always learning and integrating patterns into its AI for future use.

Dashboard and UI

Veriato Cerebral's user interface (UI) and dashboard will be familiar to users of Veriato 360 or Veriato Recon in that it follows the same design logic and organization. An expanding menu on the left contains the various sections including Recon Dashboard, 360 Dashboard, Data Explorer, Reports, Filter Categories, Recorders, users, Alerts & Policies, Configurations, and System Management.

Once the Recorders are installed on employee devices, admins can set up alerts. here are some things to consider. For the Recon component of Cerebral, which tracks anomalies and behavioral analysis, it takes up to 30 days to determine baselines and calibrate the system. A feature dubbed "360 Events" amounts to alerts triggered by comparing conditions companies set against data stored in there server. These alerts come in the form of pop-up warnings, email messages, as well as alerts on dashboard views. In order for alert emails to work, they need to be configured on the panel.

To simplify things, a top navigation bar shows global criteria and can be broken down into All Users, Excluding Groups, a date range as well as a link to time as recorded. Managers of a larger workforce don't have to muck around in the minutiae, the can simply scan the alert events as they are recorded. These include alerts thrown up for specific Keywords, Chat/IM alerts, Email alerts, Keystroke alerts, and File Transfer Events will all light up the dashboard or send notifications if configured to do so.

Setting Up Alerts

Configuration options are extensive and users of Veriato 360 will be familiar with the granular and multi-point settings available in the Alerts and Policies section. Administrators who invest time upfront and set up all their alert policies will be rewarded by a reliable and proactive employee monitoring tool. A guided walkthrough helps new users set the initial policies. An example of some of these policies include the use of game programs, which when enabled will quickly send emails to supervisors once a game is installed and run. The alert will also trigger screenshots which can serve as evidence or proof. Similar alerts that can invoke similar results include Too Much Browsing, Too Much Printing, as well as Special Email Alerts.

Setting up alerts starts with naming the alert as well as a detailed decryption and choosing which employees to apply these two. You can then select what activity triggers the alert. This includes Communication (chat/IM, email, keystrokes, or mobile calls), Files and work (App activity, Email attachments, Documents, File transfers, and work time), and Online (Website activity, Online Searches and Network Connections).

Depending on your selection, you can refine your conditions by selecting the time when the alert will be active (i.e. Monday to Friday, 9-5), you can further refine the conditions by specifying device types, program names, extensions, the path, and even the document name. The Action section allows you to choose the frequency and timing for the alerts to be triggered, how many screenshots you want to take before and after the alert event, the names and email addresses of the people to be alerted as well as the frequency of emails to be sent (i.e. send an email each hour if a different user triggers an alert).

Finally, the Email Attachments Alert Summary enables even more options including when the alerts will be collected, which users or user groups the rules apply to, various conditions to trigger sending of email attachments and other options for accelerating screenshots and sending regular status emails.

Geofencing, which can set location parameters for employees using a mobile app (and their smartphone's GPS), can be set and tuned in the Geofencing sections which provides an easy to read map view of different office locations. It is possible to use geofencing to select recording policies and assign to devices when devices check in or ping the servers from that location. Do keep in mind that geofencing's accuracy is largely dependent on variables like wireless signal strength, line-of-sight to GPS satellites, and weather conditions.

Once set up and tweaked to a company's specific tracking needs, Veriato Cerebral generates a bounty of detailed reports on employee activity. Some of these reports are focused on insider threat detection as well as safeguarding company documents and intellectual property. Other reports, however, dissect employee engagement, productivity, and which applications or websites see the most use during the course of a typical workday. While useful to determine employee productivity, keeping tabs on web services and apps can also determine if companies are paying for services that aren't useful and make a case to cut these out for budgetary reasons and to improve efficiency. This feature has become a trend and is also available to a lesser extent in Workpuls and ActiveTrak and helps companies reveal which apps or subscriptions aren't being maximized by their staff, which could save money that could be used elsewhere.

Cerebral truly excels at laying down multiple security protocols that don't just set off alerts, but can track and deter the loss of company or client information. With the inclusion of the AI and ML component, the system eventually determines what are regular routines for employees and which deviations from the norm are suspicious. This requires time and refinement, but could present the most accurate depiction of a businesses' security and productivity.

Unparalleled Depth in Threat Detection

The richness of the 360 dashboard within Cerebral is that it is already populated with the most common threats to track and report. These include Security: Fraud, Security: Flight Risks (a detailed history of employees visiting job sites), Security: Doc Tracking, and Productivity: User Time, among others. Despite the vast amount of data in these reports, Cerebral displays this all in a clear and easy to export manner. I get the sense that this is a solution that improves the longer it is enabled and refined so that businesses can really drill down into employee activity.

Veriato Cerebral compares well with other deep monitoring solutions like Editor's Choice selection Teramind, which also features an intuitive user interface that helps make sense of vast amounts of employee information. Cerebral's threat-focused posture as well as its forensic-level approach to employee monitoring and powerful AI application do give it a unique advantage. Its ability to monitor and set up behavioral baselines, use psycholinguistics to measure employee engagement and intent, as well as generate anomaly reports, gives it a definitive advantage. Beyond sending alerts and monitoring employee productivity, Veriato Cerebral gives businesses a complete defensive solution to shut down insider threats and keep valuable information within the company's domain, which earns it an Editors' Choice selection for employee monitoring.