Qualys Exposure Management Reviews

Qualys has many products. However, the prominent one is for scanning the vulnerabilities on endpoints, including servers and desktops. The other can be for using multiple other products, like taking the certificate, inventory, and software inventory of endpoints through scanning. 

Additionally, we use the solution for web application scanning. When they have web applications, they can scan applications for various vulnerabilities and give recommendations.

Almost all of the features are great. We use Qualys for vulnerability scanning of servers and web application scanning. These are the two prominent features that we often use.

The initial setup is very straightforward. 

It's stable and quite reliable.

The product can scale. 

Technical support is helpful, and the product provides a good amount of training. 

Qualys has evolved a lot. It is one of the services that has evolved a lot, and we do recommend Qualys to the specs tent. 

However, their products are very modular, so for customers, they need to provide some roadmap on how the customer can utilize their products. For example, starting with vulnerability scanning, they need to show how they can extend their products for multiple other use cases. They need to do a better job of educating customer more.

There needs to be better documentation. 

Maybe their price scheduler could be made simpler.

It's expensive.

We've been using Qualys for a long time. I've used it for more than five years.

It is stable. It is reliable. The solution doesn't have any bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze.

It's scalable. It's easy to expand. 

Many people use the solution. There are likely more than 10,000 users.

The usage is based on the business requirements. It all depends on the service offering.

They do offer a lot of support in the form of training for users. They also offer labs. The technical teams are reachable. Technical support is quite good with them.

This is an easy product to set up. It's not very complex to implement.

The deployment was very fast. We could do it in about a week's time. It can be done very quickly. There are just some configurations on the cloud, and you can handle the agent deployment using some deployment tools. 

We pay an annual licensing fee. 

Prices do vary. If it is for a standard solution, they are the best. If a company goes for some advanced solutions, like web scanning, it does become pricey. However, the basic solution is good. It's just the advanced solutions that drive up the price.

I am a consultant. 

I'd recommend the solution to others. 

I would rate the product ten out of ten.

We do vulnerability management mostly with the agents and sometimes with the scanner.

We use it to install for around 20 or 30 clients right now so that we can remotely monitor their vulnerability status and help them improve their patch management processes. When certain critical things come up, we help clients with the Log4J, identifying where they need to remediate some of the super trendy critical things that come out and identifying end-of-life operating systems and software that need to be updated.

The reporting functionality is great. The most prominent feature that made us move from Nessus Professional was the scanner-based scanning to the Qualys agent-based scanning to move to work from home and remote.

If somebody's not connected to the network, you're not going to catch them with an appliance-based scan. However, if you have the agent on, as long as they're on the network, they're constantly checking in and constantly scanning.

It's more accurate and effective to get a picture of what the vulnerabilities are in a more distributed workforce.

The reporting capabilities that are available in Qualys are a work in progress. I know they're still evolving, and it's not always perfect. However, we only have so much flexibility to pinpoint a specific thing that we want to follow or monitor across all of our clients. We can set it up in a dashboard or report and do it quickly.

They're still evolving their platform in terms of reporting capabilities. Every time they make a change, it's not always super smooth, and it's a little quirky with bugs sometimes. That said, they've been really responsive at helping resolve issues that we find. We've got a pretty close relationship with them and our account managers there. We’re working on it.

We've been using it as a service provider for about a year or so.

The solution can sometimes be buggy.

The agent itself is stable. The reporting platform seems to go through quite a bit of change that they're trying to make it more robust and developing more things, and so we'll make customizations, and they make it update, and the customizations wipe out. I wouldn't say the reporting platform is super stable at the moment. However, it more than meets our needs far beyond what we had with Nessus Professional. The ability to monitor has been stable.

It's incredibly scalable. We've got it across 20 or 30 clients, and so we're pretty happy with how scalable it is from that aspect of a multi-client platform as an MSTP of that type of service.

However, the reporting doesn't seem to be as scalable. The more clients we add to it, the slower it runs with the reporting and dashboards.

Most of our clients are small and medium-sized businesses, so each of those clients has maybe anywhere from 30 to 1,000 agents.

We do plan to increase usage. We're only a year in. We touch a couple of hundred clients a year, so we're just learning the capabilities of it and growing with Qualys as we go. We're definitely all in with Qualys at this point.

I maybe had one meeting trying to understand how to build the dashboards, however, my colleague is the one that was selected to handle the solution and works closely with technical support. From what I heard, they've been great.

We previously used Nessus Professional. We switched when we could no longer go use our paid scanner on a client environment due to COVID and not actually going to client offices and nobody being there. Therefore, at that time, it wouldn't have been an effective vulnerability scan, and we had to look at other options. While one of our larger clients does have Nessus iOS through the city government, and it's a great tool, the pricing model was just cost prohibitive for our users across so many clients, and so that's why we were looking at other tools.

It's straightforward as long as the clients have any technical know-how or central management of their devices.

The agents update themselves. There isn’t maintenance necessary once it is deployed.

I’m not clear on the pricing. We don't use it as an in-house tool, and we use it more as a managed service provider. We provide information security consulting services for many companies. When they don't have vulnerability management, we'll offer to support Qualys for them. We've got the MSP platform, and so it's not the typical pricing structure or platform. Therefore, I can’t speak to the exact pricing or typical licensing.

We pay for the Qualys platform, and we will maintain the vulnerability management for our clients until they get their own vulnerability management solution.

I’d recommend the solution to others.

In a world of the hybrid workforce and work from home, if you're looking for a more effective vulnerability management tool, you have to go to the agent-based vulnerability management tools that are out there, and we've been extremely happy with Qualys. We were also delighted with Nessus in terms of their ability to identify things. However, an agent-based scanner is above an appliance base for known devices. Ideally, you have both of them together so you can scan your network for devices that might have an agent on it. However, for known devices, we definitely have been switching and really appreciate the switch to agent-based in Qualys.

I’d rate the solution eight out of ten. The only downside is that reporting can be slow, knowing that we're dealing with trying to load dashboards with 20,000 to 30,000 agents.

Qualys' main function is to scan IT systems. It does the scanning of computer systems.

Continuous Monitoring is excellent because it is entirely dependent on the agent, and the Agent Scan, is also quite good. 

I also like the asset tagging, asset grouping features, and the dashboard, because we can customize and create our own dashboard. That's quite good. 

The most recent is VMDR, which provides a comprehensive overview of how to detect, patch, and remediate specific vulnerabilities. That is also an excellent module.

The dashboard itself could be improved, while we can customize it, they can create different tabs where we can see the trending vulnerabilities, how many there are, or how many have been fixed, as in the most recent scan report, so that trend analysis is a little easier.

Aside from that, the solution itself is fairly generic in nature. What they can do is pretty much customize everything and provide a relevant solution for everything. For example, because Qualys has a Cloud Agent that scans a system's entire inventory. As a result, they can test their use cases to determine whether or not a vulnerability has been confirmed. If they can do so, they can also provide us with a straightforward solution to a specific problem rather than a generic one. That could be one area where they can improve. 

Qualys does not currently have an IoT, SCADA vulnerability assessment, they can significantly improve their IoT, SCADA, and ICS (Industrial Control Systems) vulnerability assessment technique. When you compare with Tenable SC it has more features than Qualys VM.

If you see power grids, large oil stations, they fall under SCADA and Industrial Control Systems. These systems are very different from standard IT systems. Qualys currently does not have any features for scanning SCADA, IoT, and Industrial Control Systems.

I believe they can improve on the addition of devices. Assume I have two lakhs of devices that cannot all be added at the same time. For example, if I have two lakhs of devices, and two lakhs of those devices have a Cloud Agent, adding all of those devices at once is not easy. We have to add it 1,000 at a time, which takes a long time when there are two lakhs of assets to add. If we do 1,000 at a time, we'll have to do it for around two lakhs, which is quite difficult.

They can increase their frequency of working faster, similar to the time constraint they currently have. The second thing they can improve is the addition of assets. They can almost completely automate the process of adding assets, or they can increase the maximum number of assets that can be added in one go. They are only allowed to add 1,000 assets. If I want to add two lakh assets, it will be extremely difficult to do so by adding 1,000, at a time.

That is a fairly technical issue. Most of the false positives reported by Qualys or the inability to detect a cumulative patch update, if any, are the few things that they can improve and incorporate. 

As I previously stated, it would be extremely beneficial if they could implement scanning, vulnerability scanning of IoT systems, Industrial Control Systems, and SCADA devices.

I have been working with Qualys VM for approximately four years.

We have been using multiple Qualys modules, such as VMDR, Cloud Agent, AssetView, and Continuous Monitoring. The most recent version that we are using is 4.14.

It's reasonably steady. When we say stable version, there is also room for improvement in that Qualys will not be able to handle large amounts of data at once. When you do billions of scans, such as a scan for millions of devices, it becomes extremely slow, and gathering data and populating the report becomes extremely tedious. 

Scalability is quite good. We can pretty much rely on the tool. It is easy to scale. 

If the organization grows, we can pretty much scale it to most of the areas. The only problem is that they must primarily work on Industrial Control Systems and lightweight devices such as CCTV cameras, and lightweight devices. As a result, they are required to work in that field, otherwise, it is pretty good.

Based on my previous experience, there were approximately 300 or more users using Qualys in organizations with a population of more than two lakh people. Currently, I see that approximately 400 users are using it, and the size of the organization is significantly larger than the previous one.

We use this solution daily.

Technicals support is pretty good. Since I've been working in this, they've been friendly and straightforward, and we were able to get the most out of them.

We have suggested areas for improvement, and they have been working on them. They always make a good impression on us.

As a consultant, I've worked on a variety of projects in a variety of organizations.

The initial setup is simple and straightforward.

We initially had assistance from the vendor, but once we had a good understanding of it, we scaled it in our organization.

Because I've been using Qualys for quite some time, I was looking for a comparison of several solutions such as Tenable SC, Rapid7, InsightVM, and Tenable Nessus. I was curious to know if there were any other tools that were better than Qualys.

I was looking for more information about Tenable SC and wanted to compare it to Qualys in more detail, with parameters such as, how the false positives are detected in Tenable SC and how good it is in comparison to Qualys. In a similar manner, in comparison to Qualys, we learn about its usability, interface, and how user-friendly it is. Those are the few things I was looking for, and I'm still looking for more information about Tenable right now.

They have the ability to improve SCADA. SCADA stands for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, and IoT stands for Internet of Things scanning.

Recommending this solution would depend on the organization, the requirements, and the devices they have.

For a typical IT system, it is very good to go with this solution. Microsoft, Deloitte, and the majority of organizations still use it, it is pretty much good to go. But, once again, it is entirely dependent on how the organization is, what type of devices they have, and what kind of scans they would like to have, it is entirely dependent.

In a broad sense, it is a good solution to go with.

I would rate Qualys VM an eight out of ten.

Qualys VMDR is a vulnerability management and detection response tool. It belongs to the first generation of vulnerability assessment tools. It enables us to manually identify vulnerable keys and fix them. It is built as a cutting-edge continuous platform where we can detect and protect. With this product, we can respond to specific vulnerabilities, going beyond just using artificial intelligence features. We have implemented VMDR across our cloud, physical interfaces, endpoints, and log servers. It's a good digital product for our organization.

It has improved our organization in many ways. We needed to have a security solution that focuses on different types of things. We discussed budgeting for the cloud and the need for an alternative to taking care of malware. Additionally, we have to consider various attacks. Therefore, Qualys VMDR is a great tool that helps us improve.

The most valuable feature is automation.

Qualys VMDR is basically susceptible to false positives, and false negatives. We receive a lot of false positives in there. VMDR can be considered a complex solution, especially for enterprises with limited resources or organizations. It requires extensive knowledge as an engineer. So, when using this tool, you need to utilize other tools to remediate the false security issues.

So maybe it should also have the ability to automatically identify and address false positives. In additional features, an automated process for remediating false positives. We might be looking for new types of signatures that can help us identify and address specific issues.

I have been using Qualys VMDR for one last year. 

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

It took us one month to set up.

I have seen an ROI.

The price is very reasonable, so you can definitely go with all the endpoints it offers.  

Just consider the licenses we have within VMware. They could replicate some of these features, which are used for premium customers. So, it might be useful to include those features in the subscription plans.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for vulnerability management. It helps us identify potentially vulnerable assets. Thus, we can prioritize patching based on a risk score.

The solution is easy to use and has many essential features. I found the concept of tags the most valuable feature. It allows us to build assets from different views. We can categorize systems with tags, either automatically or manually.

The solution's cloud agent is available only for limited operating systems such as Windows and Linux. They should make it accessible for more systems like FreeBSD. Also, it would be helpful if they made it available for Cisco or Juniper routers. Additionally, its price and support could be better as well.

We have been using the solution for six years.

The solution is stable. However, it takes time to generate reports.

We have ten solution users in our organization.

The solution's technical support team replies with generic answers. The quality of the response could be better.

Neutral

The solution's initial setup process was straightforward. We just followed the documentation.

The solution is costly.

I recommend the solution to others and rate it as a eight.

We use the solution for vulnerability and policy scan. 

The product has helped us understand cybersecurity controls. 

I am impressed with the VMDR feature. 

The tool needs to improve the adding assets and report generation features. I would like to see the policy scan of offline appliances in the product's future releases. 

I have been using the product for three years. 

I would rate the product's stability a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the tool's scalability an eight out of ten. My company has 10 IT specialists using the product. 

The product's support is not very helpful. They suggest things that we already know. 

Neutral

I would rate the product's setup an eight out of ten. The tool's deployment took one to two days to complete. 

We deployed the solution in-house. 

The tool's pricing is expensive and I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. You need to complete the training before using the product. 

This is a virtual scanner appliance. We have both physical and virtual options. 

I'm still in training and getting the hang of the solution. I do not know what features the company uses the most. They generally use it to scan all the AWS workloads and Azure workloads.

We generally analyze everything at the OS level and application level, including the open ports, the OS, and older versions, including the packaged versions. We generate the scan, and then we generate the report, and then we will issue it to the application teams to clear off those. 

We have Java remediation happening, and if Java has, for example, multiple versions and when I run the scan, it is going to identify all Java versions that are really vulnerable so you can fix them. Therefore, it helps keep things secure and up-to-date. 

The reporting is good. We give reports to the application teams and we will ask them to either fix or remove applications. Once that is done, then we will read the scan, and if it comes back that we don't have any critical, we are assured of good safety. 

The solution shows us classic categories, including high, medium, and low risks. It also shows critical items, and that gives us the advantage of prioritizing things. 

It's very clear on what components need to be fixed. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

It's stable.

Technical support is helpful. 

I can't speak to disadvantages since I am in training and still learning and have yet to run a scan. 

It would be nice to have an all-in-one solution that was automated and could handle the scanning and reports as well as the patching and updating. 

I am pretty new to this organization. However, the organization has been dealing with the solution for almost four or five years now.

The stability has been good. The company has been using it for a while and hasn't had issues. I use dit in a previous company as well and never hear of any problems. 

It's easy to scale. 

Technical support is good. We always get a quick response. 

The setup process is simple. It's not overly complex. 

I don't have any details about the licensing process. 

We're implementors. 

When it comes to security, my only advice is based on my experience. They always say to use multiple products due to the fact that, even if the vulnerability is missed in one product, it'll be identified in the other product so that you are safe. 

However, when it comes to implementation, if you have multiple products, pipelining is a big problem. For example, if I use the Qualys scanner, and then it gives me all the vulnerabilities: how do I fix it? Either I have to fix it manually, or I have to fix it automatically. 

I'd like to use one product, and, for example, use a vulnerability scanner from Qualys and have patch management as well. While the solution is still maturing, I like the tight integration and I like that the scanner can identify items and patch management can fix them. It simplifies things, instead of having to deal with multiple products and then maybe having to manually fix items on top of that. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Qualys VM is used for vulnerability scanning.

It's really beneficial for scanning and interacting with the agent. 

The disadvantage of working with Qualys is that the graphical interface is quite outdated.

If you want to choose a scan result, or maybe configure an IP range or something similar, it opens up a lot of processes, or steps, which is somewhat bothersome. Because it opens several phases, it is not a single-window program. 

We are testing it, as well as Rapid 7 InsightVM.

We have been testing Qualys VM for approximately five weeks.

Qualys VM is a stable solution.

Qualys VM is a scalable product.

It works with ten assets. It works with 100 assets. It has worked with 3,000 assets. It's quite scalable.

In our organization, we have two dedicated people, and five others are only dedicated to gaining insights. 

It actually depends on how you remediate all of the vulnerabilities in Qualys since you can also set up it such that product owners, that is, the owners of the apps that are deployed on all systems, can access reports and everything. But that's not how we do things.

The security and infrastructure departments are using this solution in our organization.

We have a dedicated Qualys team of two persons assisting us with the implementation.

We are currently doing a proof of concept with both Qualys VM and Rapid 7 InsightVM.

Qualys is a fully SaaS solution.

It is dependent on the configuration. When you work with the agent, you are primarily concerned with deploying the agents to all assets. However, if you want to scan based on IP, you'll run into some problems.

If you wish to scan on an IP basis, for example, you should deploy a virtual appliance. You may set up several appliances for different domains. Otherwise, you must have your network rules properly configured so that the appliance can reach every asset.

It's relatively simple to set up the basics, but if you want to scan, it really depends on how many networks and domains you have.

In a couple of weeks, you can set it up.

It's very expensive, especially if you want to use multiple modules of Qualys.

I think mainly decide how you want to scan: based on IP or based on an agent.

Then work with the interface and then explore how it works.

I would rate Qualys VM an eight out of ten.

We use this solution to scan the servers on the network. It is used predominantly by our information security team.

This solution gives us insight into our environment and improves our security. It helps us to maintain a good patching system whereby we know that XYZ is vulnerable within the system. 

Qualys makes us proactive in terms of handling patching and effective when it comes to scanning out network.

Qualys could be improved in its overall performance compared to other vulnerability management or scanning tools. 

I have been using this solution for five years. 

I have previously used Nessus. Overall, Nessus is a better tool because it provides greater insight into all vulnerabilities, some of which are skipped by Qualys. 

This solution is very easy to set up. 

We worked with a third party to complete deployment. 

In Nigerian Naira, we spend about roughly four to five million to use this solution and this is expensive compared to solutions like Nessus.

I would advise others to run a proof of concept and to exhaust all functionality if considering Qualys. This may take between 15 and 60 days to complete. 

I would rate this solution a six out of ten. 

Our customers use Qualys for vulnerability management, it's a way for them to discover the kinds of vulnerabilities they have on their systems. We are a partner with Qualys and I'm an infrastructure security consultant. We currently have 20 clients using Qualys. 

The functionality continues to improve and knowing when there are security issues is very helpful. 

I like the Qualys Cloud Agent because it's very easy to use. It has a low impact and is supported on Windows, Linux, and others. I deploy process scanners, which are usually connected to core switches so customers can replicate all the connections. Almost all our customers try to use the agents because they're already installed and integrated into the cloud and communicate with Qualys management. There are no problems and it's really better than using some virtual appliance to scan the various kinds of assets. Qualys has a lot of information and it's great to integrate with the Central Management Database.

If you're not overly experienced and you're looking for something in their management, it can sometimes be quite difficult because they can move buttons around without sending an update. Previously, if you deployed the Cloud Agent, you could define which tech would be under the agent and where it would be deployed. It now requires some text preparation and the Cloud Agent then downloads the specific profile defined without any indication that this might happen. If you are not using vulnerability management, you are not able to create the correct patch process for all applications stored on the system.

It would be helpful if Qualys would integrate with more systems like ServiceNow, Jira, and so on, to create some tickets and integrate them into the active directory, because each group works differently and if you need to prepare a ticket, it must be defined to a specific group of people. Qualys just created a kit on ServiceNow, but it doesn't have the correct group of people in the active directory.

I've been using this solution for three years. 

The solution is scalable. If you need more resources they can be added to the backend, depending on the circumstances and requirements. If you are able to deploy in the VMDR licensing, you are able to deploy unlimited virtual active appliances to discounted appliances. It all depends on your resources. 

Each customer is different and if you need to deploy a more active virtual process that will affect the implementation. If a customer wants to use policy compliance on their machines that can add to deployment time too. I tend to deploy myself because I'm usually making the POCs of Qualys.

I believe the annual cost is approximately $40 per asset in VMDR, although it also depends on the circumstances. It contains all the features one needs although if you need synchronization with ServiceNow and CMDB, there is an additional cost. 

I constantly speak to other companies to find out what they're doing and what the differences are between the different products. My job is to find the best solution for my customers so it's important to know what's on the market.

I rate this solution eight out of 10.