* The Reviewmeister finds QualysGuard to be a topnotch vulnerability assessment service
QualysGuard is a topnotch vulnerability assessment service. You start with a 1U appliance that sits on your network and lets Qualys scan your internal subnets. Setup is easy, and the quick start guide will have you scanning in no time. Because it is provided as a service, the Qualys team seamlessly adds the vulnerability checks.
Our discovery assessment focuses on how well the products find and identify systems, system software and services running on the network. Our accuracy measurement takes into account how well the product identified vulnerabilities that existed on a sample of lab systems (see “How we did it”).
Qualys scored highest in our operating system identification checks and was the only product to correctly identify our wireless access point. It performed as well as any of the other products in the vulnerability accuracy tests, but still reported some false positives and false negatives. It did perform strongest among the products in identifying Windows system vulnerabilities, though.
Scan impact was low from a network perspective, but we did need to restart a Red Hat Enterprise system that became completely unresponsive after the scan.
Overall, QualysGuard is very flexible and easy to use. IT staff and/or corporate executives can be given varying levels of access to system groups and reports. Scan and report templates provide flexibility in the types of checks that are performed and how the results are viewed.
Remediation policies can be configured to automatically assign tickets in the Qualys ticketing system to defined individuals based on scan results. Qualys could improve on remediation if it added some preemptive notification mechanism to tell IT folks they have been assigned a remediation task.
In terms of providing some business analysis capabilities, Qualys lets you rank assets in terms of how critical they are to your business. A score is then provided in the summary based on your overall exposure level that can be weighted based on how critical the vulnerable asset might be.
One of the best features of QualysGuard is its mapping functionality, which provides a graphical representation of all the devices it discovers on your network. You can drill down on the map to identify the operating systems and services running on these devices, but can’t see information on identified vulnerabilities from this vantage point. In addition to the mapping, we’d also like to see some sort of overview console that provides high-level information on the state of vulnerabilities on the network.
For the full report, go to https://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/110804rev.html
