Review: RedSeal Systems Network Advisor & Vulnerability Advisor

RedSeal Systems develops security posture management solutions that allow organizations to assess and strengthen their cyberdefenses to quickly adapt to ever-changing threats and business conditions. The solution reviewed consisted of RedSeal's Network Advisor and Vulnerability Advisor v4.2.

The offering is provided as software and as an appliance. The software version is supported on 64-bit Windows Server or Sun JRE 6.

Unlike systems that detect attacks after they occur, RedSeal identifies risky holes in infrastructure before they are discovered by hackers, allowing organizations to address issues proactively.

RedSeal software analyzes the complex interaction of firewalls, routers, load balancers and hosts, delivering in-depth understanding of the overall security posture. This allows continuous compliance with various mandates. One of the strongest aspects of this offering is its ability to analyze network controls and correlate that data to scanner results, thus ranking vulnerabilities based on their exposure to untrusted networks (i.e., can this threat reach a network and, if so, is there a vulnerability there for it to exploit).

There were a lot of attractive features that caught our eye. There is a "what-if" analysis capability that can assess a change and show users what can be exposed down to the rule and vulnerability. By understanding which vulnerabilities are truly exposed, versus those that are mitigated by firewalls or other controls, RedSeal allows organizations to rapidly prioritize remediation efforts to address those issues that represent the greatest risks.

This is a capable IT risk management tool. For what it does, it performs well.