Companies often want to run multiple scanners against their systems for completeness, but the cost of that second opinion can be prohibitive. If you are in the market for a less expensive secondary scanner, you might want to take a look at SunBelt Network Security Inspector.

SunBelt - which acts as an OEM to the Harris vulnerability database - sets its price at about $1,500 per administrator, not licensed by IP address like most of its competitors. Based on this price, relative scanning speed and ease of use, SunBelt could be used as a secondary point scanner for quick scans, but based on our accuracy testing, we don't recommend that you rely on it as a primary vulnerability assessment tool.

While the scan impact was minimal, SunBelt's product did not identify all the devices in our operating system identification test and provided limited information, such as "Linux" or "Windows" for the systems it identified.

Vulnerability scan results also were out of line with the other products tested. SunBelt would sometimes identify different vulnerabilities than the other products, although the remediation tasks would result in the issue being fixed. On the Red Hat 6.2 system, though, it identified 14 vulnerabilities that were false positives and not reported by any of the other products tested.

The SunBelt GUI is very strong. The product is fast and very easy to use. Reports are provided through a Crystal Reports engine, but they are only exportable by printing to PDF.

Because this product is designed to be a point scanner, scan scheduling and options configuration are not included. Vulnerability updates are also only performed manually.