Qualys Virtual Scanner Appliance alternatives and competitors

In our first use case, we wanted to map the solution back to our NIS (Network and Information Systems) framework and the CIS (Center for Internet Security that publishes Critical Security Controls). That is the first part. The second part of this same use case is that we wanted to do continuous vulnerability scanning. That is we wanted to scan the complete network every month at a minimum. What we are finding out in practice is that we are scanning every week because of our network and the size of it. In the end, we are able to get even more aggressive than our original position.  

The next use case was we wanted to identify the assets that were in our environment. We can identify how many servers we have, we have identified how many desktops and laptops we have got, et cetera. To that point is where we were looking at pretty good.  

Our next use case was the obvious next step where we wanted to identify vulnerabilities. That meant identifying all the vulnerabilities from critical all the way down to the low. We needed to know what they were and how many. Also, we wanted to know how many are unique versus how many there are in total.  

We also wanted to get away from tracking vulnerabilities on spreadsheets. It was incredibly cumbersome, incredibly hard to do, and it was not efficient. The IT guys kept telling me that they did not know how to fix certain issues. So I thought we needed to do CVSS ( Common Vulnerability Scoring System) on it. They were a bit resistant to that idea. Well, I was not about to start doing that for them. So InsightVM gives us the ability now to track the issues and communicate how the remediation should occur to fix vulnerabilities.  

Then the last thing is we wanted was to have a dashboard for management. We had to have a dashboard to be able to have a CIO (Chief Information Officer) log in and find out where we sit with things. Like where do we sit with remediation where are we failing to make expected progress and things of that nature.  

Rapid7 gave us the ability to do a lot of that, and it was not a cumbersome tool to implement. It is good and fits well with pretty much all of our use case needs. It only falls short in a couple of spots.  

Now that we have been using it, I think there are some things Rapid7 needs to consider and address in improving InsightsVM. I think the reporting piece has room for improvement. While they have a lot of reporting, and some of the reporting is really good, there are some things that I think they can do better on. They need to add some categories that are not covered and expand a few things that have only surface coverage.  

I would love to be on a customer advisory board so that I could provide feedback to them and show them what their solution does not do. For example, I could point out things that I can not do with a widget on the dashboard that I would expect it to be able to do. Things like that might help them improve the product from a real user's perspective. That could amount to a lot of different things, but ideally, it would focus on your most common issues.  

There were a couple of things I know that the security analyst and I were looking at and we were wondering why Rapid7 would choose to implement it that way. Like if they did not include something we needed as part of a report, we could not do what we expected when running the report. That is a little frustrating. I would say that they need to spend some more time evaluating enhancements suggested by customers so that they can get those things implemented and round out the user experience. That is the reason why I think a CAB (Customer Advisory Board) is important for vendors like Rapid7.  

We rolled it out in our operations between June and September. So we have been using it since June of 2020.  

I do not know at this point just how scalable this solution is. We bought it for an enterprise solution, so our enterprise need is getting solved. I do not know how much scaling we have to do on top of that. I do not like the fact that as a vulnerability scanner, this product has a fault to a certain extent. We want to be able to scan applications dynamically and this solution does not give us that ability. It does for web apps. But if you are a company that does not have a lot of web apps, something is getting left uncovered.  

Let's say you have a third-party app. You go to that third-party developer and you ask if they have ever done a security attestation on the application. They look at you and like they have no idea what the heck you are talking about and they have no idea what that means. It would be good, in that case, to be able to take the Rapid7 product and point it at that third-party app and scan it dynamically. That way you can get code vulnerabilities or functional vulnerabilities. What would otherwise be a problem is something you could identify and isolate. If Rapid7 looked at the scripting and identified a secret injection attack at line 1,141 — or something to that effect — it could be vetted. It does do that, but it only does that on web applications. Why stop there?  

In order to solve that issue, you have to go out and buy another third-party product that allows you to scan the application to do dynamic or static vulnerability scanning on the application. I do not like that omission because I had that capability with Qualys. We could take Qualys and we could point it at an application and get dynamic scanning reports from it. It told us a line that needed to be fixed and everything.  

I have not yet gotten into the bowels of that discussion with Rapid7, but I want to. What I did find out about it is our current setup does not cover that type of potential application vulnerability. It does allow for some scanning of web applications, but we are not a company that has a lot of web applications. We are not a retail organization. We do not sell anything. We do have web applications, but they are mainly used for marketing.  

We probably have close to a dozen people in our organization who are currently interfacing in some way with Rapid7 InsightVM. That part is scalable. The utility does have those certain limitations, however.  

We have a client service manager for Rapid7 tech support. He is an appointed customer service manager where we have him for the first year. We are working with him to identify things, correct things, implement, attune, and things like that. Because of that relationship, I do not have a need to call their regular tech support right now. We just worked through the service manager.  

I have had some previous experience with Qualys and using Rapid7 now is really a matter of what I chose to bring on based on my personal user experience. Each has its own advantages and neither is a bad product.   

The initial installation and setup were pretty much straightforward. We did run into an issue with credentialing. We ended up working through that and got that correct.  

I think it was done fairly quickly overall. When we ran into that credentialing issue, we spent about three weeks or so — almost a month — working through that. The issue meant involving some guys from some of the other IT teams and getting them into the mix to help us out.  

I had implemented InsightVM before at another company. I liked it when we were using it there which is why it ended up here. I have also had previous experience with Qualys. I did not have the time or the luxury to sit back and do a full analysis, RFI (Request for Information) and RFP (Request for Proposal) when we had to bring on the solution. We are not the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), we are not the NSA (National Security Agency). We do not need any sophisticated solution or anything like that. We just needed something we could bring in, get online fairly quickly, and get running to do reports. Rapid7 InsightsVM fit the bill.  

On a scale of one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate Rapid7 InsightVM as probably about an eight-out-of-ten. It gets an eight rather than scoring higher just because of some of the other stuff that I wish we had.  

Orca gives us visibility across all the assets in our multi-cloud environment in a single dashboard. That kind of visibility is rare for us and most organizations within the Fintech space. You could understand particular vulnerabilities in a pocket of your environment, but not to the extent that Orca provides today. To protect a business, you first want to look at your environment and inventory all your assets. All of these assets are still managed in a spreadsheet in many organizations today. Some of them are using tools that list all of the assets. We had an inventory, but the Orca tool could identify assets we thought were no longer operational.

It isn't easy to quantify right now, but I can say that Orca gives us greater visibility of assets that we thought were gone but were correctly configured. Using Orca, we were able to identify certain assets that were still lying around and using an older operating system. Some of these were actually unpatched even though we thought they were patched.

We like that Orca is continuously monitoring our environment. When you open the tool, you instantly get an overview of your current state of affairs. You see everything happening across your multi-cloud environment in one view. When you're working on GCP or Azure, and you also have some other elements within AWS, it isn't easy to have a tool that spans all these cloud environments. It's great to have a single dashboard that puts all your cloud environments at your fingertips.

Orca tool spans all our environments and gives us a compliance report. It can tell us where there are vulnerabilities within our environment and provide us with access to the logs of specific assets.

With any security tool, there's always room for improvement. We were among the early adopters, and many of the major improvements that we were looking for have already been added. Right now, we're looking at what the other players in that space are offering and if it can be integrated into Orca. I had a discussion with Orca six months ago about implementing these features. But once you start customizing your tool for specific customers, it doesn't necessarily mean that it will match the needs of other customers, and you begin to branch out. In general, I think the Orca's roadmap is pretty well aligned to what we need today.

We are fortunate to have been using Orca since its inception. I think we were among Orca's first customers. We're always searching for new tools with intriguing capabilities that can help us better protect our organization. When I came across Orca, I felt it offered something others on the market didn't. 

I rate Orca support 9.5 out of 10. Whenever we've sent a support ticket, Orca responds in less than an hour to tell us that they've received the request and are looking into it. We get a reply a couple of hours later most of the time. Sometimes it needed more work, but I think it was pretty fast.

Support is one of the essential features you look for when purchasing a tool. Of course, you could buy a SaaS product, but if there is no support behind it, you'll have difficulty configuring it properly within your environment. Sometimes, you expect certain features to work correctly, but maybe you are configuring the solution wrong, so it's great to have support personnel available to respond to all your queries. 

Positive

When we started using the Orca tool, we already had some tools offering some of these features. However, we realized we didn't need to have all these agent-based tools installed across our environment to understand our risk footprint. We quickly understood that it would be easier to deploy across our entire multi-cloud environment if we went agentless with the Orca tool. It would offer us more capabilities than Qualys or even some of the AWS tooling available today, and we could consolidate everything under one tool.

AWS has some tools that give you visibility into your environment. They can tell you where your PII is or if your assets are correctly configured. However, every new feature that AWS releases is only available in the US first. Sometimes they're not available in Japan, Canada, and Europe until months or years later. We're still waiting for these features to be available here in Japan. For example, AWS Macie is still not available in Japan today, and it has been two years now. There are many capabilities like this that we want the cloud provider to release in other countries, but it's not available today.

What's more, if I run some AWS tooling, it will only scan my AWS environment but not my GCP or Azure environments. It's complicated to consolidate all of these reports in one place at the end of the month. Orca gives me a single view across all my environments.

One of Orca's most significant advantages is that you can deploy it within your environment with a single click. There were no agents to install, so the deployment was quite easy. We simply entered the information about the cloud that we wanted to gain visibility into, and it was done. It can take days or weeks to deploy some other tools within an environment, especially if you're on-prem and sometimes on the cloud as well. We could deploy Orca in a matter of minutes. It was up and running within 15 minutes the first time we set it up.  

When you're talking about return on investment, you have to consider the resources needed to implement, maintain, and support a tool. With Orca, we didn't need to deploy or upgrade anything, and we didn't need to understand anything about support because they already had great support. I think we're saving hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in staffing costs alone. The time-to-value was instant. 

When we purchased Orca, it came with everything we needed. We didn't need to buy any additional features, extensions, etc. You pay one price, and you have access to everything. I think their pricing model is aligned with market demand. Of course, Orca could probably better align their pricing model with the needs of smaller businesses as well as some larger-scale enterprises with millions of assets. But in all fairness, I think the Orca sales team has been accommodating and ensured that we're happy with the pricing.

When we purchased Orca, there was some overlap with tools like Qualys that scan your environment for vulnerabilities. But Qualys is not well-suited for specific microservices. It doesn't give you all the visibility that you need in a particular area of your environment. 

We are PCI DSS compliant, so we need to scan our environment externally with tools vetted by the PCI DSS organization. Orca doesn't scan the environment externally. It only scans what's currently in the cloud. There is some overlap between Orca and other tools, but others can scan externally. I still don't think Orca is in the business of scanning assets externally because they only scan internally. That's why we purchased it.

I would rate Orca 9.5 out of 10. It covers our entire multi-cloud environment in a single view and tells us everything we need to know about our vulnerability footprint. For example, it can tell us whether our S3 bucket is misconfigured. There are so many valuable features that I could list, but one that I appreciate is the PCI DSS compliance report. Someone asked me if I would recommend Orca the other day, and I told them not to take my word for it. They should just try it.

We primarily use the solution for on-premises monitoring. We use it to monitor the servers in our organization.

For most of the updates, Windows updates, et cetera, the service will let us know when we shouldn't apply an update due to the fact that there's some missing code, for example. It gives us great insights into security risks.

The vulnerability scanning has been great as it's helped us to define some issues around the updates of some things, and some items surrounding services we need to take care of.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The solution has been very stable and quite scalable.

The dashboard and the main panel could be better. It's lacking right now. Sometimes it's hard to find what you need in the menus. There needs to be better dashboard navigation.

There needs to be more curation of core knowledge.

The documentation was hard to find. It's not all in one place. It's kind-of all over. You have to work to seek it out.

I can't recall any features that are lacking. I can't think of any additions we'd like to see in the next release.

I've been using the solution for six months at this point. This has occurred within the last year. It hasn't been that long.

The stability is very good. I haven't had any issues with it. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The scalability of the solution is very good. If a company needs to expand it out, it can do so with relative ease.

We have a few network engineers that work with the solution directly.

I can't speak to any plans in terms of increasing usage. it's not something that we've discussed.

I've never directly dealt with technical support. I can't speak to how knowledgeable or responsive they are. 

I've read a lot of documentation and whitepapers on the product. However, they were not concentrated in one place. I had issues teaching down details about the product.

We did previously use a different solution, however, we've found Tenable to be much better.

The initial setup is quite straightforward. It's not complex. It was very easy to create an account

The deployment itself only took one day. It was quite fast.

We have four people on staff that are knowledgeable enough to handle deployment and maintenance.

We handled everything ourselves. it was all online and very simple. We didn't need the assistance of a consultant or reseller. 

I don't handle the licensing aspects of the solution. I'm not aware of the costs involved.

We potentially looked at Qualys and Rapid7 before ultimately choosing Tenable.

I cannot control the main difference.

We're a partner.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using.

I'd recommend the solution to other companies.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten overall. We're mostly very happy with its capabilities.

We are currently using Qualys for vulnerability detection, as part of our security solution. We're moving towards Defender ATP because I am looking more at the Operational Technology (OT) side of things than I am at the Information Technology (IT) side.

What I like best about this product is that it does what it is supposed to do, which is vulnerability scanning.

We are moving away from Qualys to Defender ATP because I find that Defender ATP is much better at prioritizing the vulnerabilities that I should be looking at.

In general, I would like to see some better analytics and prioritization of vulnerabilities.

We have been working with Qualys VM for three years.

Qualys VM is a stable solution.

This is a stable product.

Technical support is great and we've never really had a problem. They're always there if we need them.

We did not work with another similar solution prior to Qualys.

The initial setup is straightforward.

Our setup involved some on-premises deployments but ultimately, it uses the cloud.

They have recently changed the pricing model, which is now better than it was before.

Right now, we don't have anything in our OT environment, and this is what I am particularly interested in. I am currently having discussions about new solutions with Qualys, Tenable, and Forescout.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use Tenable Nessus for vulnerability assessments.

I have found the vulnerability assessment and the reports to be useful.

The solution could improve by having better integration with different vendors' IPS solutions. The ACLs and IPS policies signatures should be enabled based on the results of Tenable Nessus automatically, we currently have to do it manually which is very time-consuming. It has done a good job integrating with Fortinet but we would like it to be better integrated with other solutions that we have. Additionally, After Tenable Nessus was able to recognize the vulnerability it would be great to have it virtually batch the systems if you are not able to update the different systems.

I have been using Tenable Nessus within the last 12 months.

While doing the scans we have not had any issues, the solution is stable.

Tenable Nessus is scalable.

The technical support was responsive and helpful. We were trying different integrations and needed some assistance.

We used Qualys previously. 

The initial setup is very easy and straightforward. The VM can be done very quickly and the whole process takes approximately 30 minutes. The installation is quicker than others solutions, such as Qualys.

The price of the solution is reasonable.

I rate Tenable Nessus an eight out of ten.