Which Vulnerability Management Solution to Choose? Focus on Tenable.io

Every network in the world experiences constant flux, as systems, software, code and middleware shift. This flux creates complexity, and the opportunity for vulnerabilities to emerge: in operating systems, in applications, in browsers, in every kind of software. These vulnerabilities can be targeted by actors seeking to infect systems and breach security.

Companies combat these bad actors by undertaking what is called vulnerability management. They scan their infrastructure for vulnerabilities, and upon discovering them, they intervene with patches and other solutions. This firefighting is facilitated by  various vulnerability management solutions that both carry out the scanning and suggest the remediation action.

Within the vulnerability management solution space, there are three market leaders: Rapid7, Qualys and Nessus.

Here’s everything you need to know about Tenable.io.

An integral part of Tenable.io’s vulnerability management solution is Nessus, their proprietary vulnerability scanner. Nessus has been around for twenty years, and is one of the most widely deployed security technologies in the world. It now constitutes a central component in the wider Tenable.io SaaS platform.

As you would expect, Nessus’s pedigree makes Tenable.io the leader in vulnerability scanning, and a highly established all-round vulnerability management solution. (Tenable counts amongst its customers the U.S. Department of Defense, Deloitte, Visa, BMW, Adidas, and Microsoft.)

Deployed via the Tenable SecurityCenter platform, Nessus is the best scanner in the business. The overall SecurityCenter UI is slick, probably the best of all the vulnerability management solutions. Everything is viewed and managed through a set of pre-built but very customizable dashboards and reports. Nessus can run as a passive scanner, offering you a round-the-clock view of what is happening in your network. The security analytics are second to none.

SecurityCenter provides a modern REST API that makes integrating with other apps or hooking scripting interactions into the server a piece of cake. You can also create credentials within policies, meaning that definition process is easier than in Rapid7 or Qualys. Also, Tenable.io provides predefined templates consisted from SCADA policies and malware databases.

Predictive Prioritization

In addition to all this, Tenable recently announced Predictive Prioritization, a cool new feature that helps organizations prioritize the most threatening three percent of vulnerabilities.

If exploitation testing is important to your security stance, then Tenable can’t beat Rapid7. When it comes to effective pentesting, then Rapid7’s combination of Metasploit and Nexpose is the best option. By the same taken, Qualys is better set up for heavily cloud-based operations, or users in need of in-depth IT operations management (ITOM).

But if vulnerability scanning is what you need, then Tenable.io’s Nessus is the right choice.

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