- Allows You To Create Policies: Most HIPS solutions come with a pretty comprehensive set of pre-defined policies and vendors will typically offer updates or release new policies to provide a specific response for new threats or attacks. However, it is important that you have the ability to create your own policies in the event that you have a unique threat that the vendor doesn't account for or when a new threat is exploding and you need a policy to defend your system before the vendor has time to release an update. You need to make sure the product you use not only has the ability for you to create policies, but that policy creation is simple enough for you to understand without weeks of training or expert programming skills.
- Provides Central Reporting and Administration: While we are talking about host-based protection for individual servers or workstations, HIPS and NIPS solutions are relatively expensive and outside of the realm of a typical home user. So, even when talking about HIPS you probably need to consider it from the standpoint of deploying HIPS on possibly hundreds of desktops and servers across a network. While it is nice to have protection at the individual desktop level, administering hundreds of individual systems, or trying to create a consolidated report can be nearly impossible without a good central reporting and administering function. When selecting a product, ensure that it has centralized reporting and administration to allow you to deploy new policies to all machines or to create reports from all machines from one location.
Secondly, the initial implementation of a HIPS solution can be painstaking. Configuring the anomaly-based detection often requires a good deal of "hand-holding" to help the application understand what is "normal" traffic and what is not. You may experience a number of false positives or missed negatives while you work to establish the baseline of what defines "normal" traffic for your machine.
Lastly, companies generally make purchases based on what they can do for the company. Standard accounting practice suggests that this be measured based on the return on investment, or ROI. Accountants want to understand if they invest a sum of money in a new product or technology, how long will it take for the product or technology to pay for itself.
Unfortunately, network and computer security products don't generally fit this mold. Security works on more of a reverse-ROI. If the security product or technology works as designed the network will remain safe- but there will be no "profit" to measure an ROI from. You have to look at the reverse though and consider how much the company could lose if the product or technology were not in place. How much money would have to be spent on rebuilding servers, recovering data, the time and resources of dedicating technical personnel to clean up after an attack, etc? If not having the product may potentially result in losing significantly more money than the product or technology costs to implement, then perhaps it makes sense to do so.