Review: GFi LANguard Network Security Scanner

For:Good amount of scanning and reporting capability in an easy to use interface. Against:Can become expensive for large-scale environments. Verdict: A solid product, if you can afford it.

The GFi LANguard Network Security Scanner focuses into three areas of network security scanning.

The first of these is vulnerability scanning. This scanner uses a very large vulnerability database to deeply scan targets and provide information on how to remediate potential threats. Second, the scanner can help deploy necessary patches across the network. The final piece of this product is ongoing auditing and management. This is achieved through scheduled scans for security auditing features that are enabled on machines in the environment.

We found this product to be fairly easy to install and setup. Installation is done by simply running an executable, which launches a short installation wizard. This wizard takes just a few minutes and sets up everything needed for the product, including the backend database. After installation is complete, management is done through a GUI console. We found this console to be quite intuitive, and setting up scans took just a few clicks of the mouse.

With the ability to do local scans, network wide scans and even custom scans, this tool proved to be quite flexible throughout our testing. We found accessing specific scan results to be easy and intuitive, as was navigating the well organized tree structure of the console.

Documentation comes as a single PDF manual, which contains all the documentation for this product - from installation requirements and setup, all the way through using the product and product features. This guide, while lengthy, is well organised and includes many screen shots, diagrams and examples.

GFi builds one year of support into the purchase price. Support includes phone and email technical support. There is also a large support area on the website, which includes product documentation and an extensive knowledge base.

At a base price of almost US$250 for four IPs, this tool can become expensive very quickly for larger environments. However, we do find that it does have some good scanning ability and some nice features. We rate this product an average value for the money.

See original article on SC Magazine US

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