Tenable Security Center Reviews

At work we use the enterprise version of Tenable, Tenable.io, and I also use Tenable.sc — which I refer to as SecurityCenter — for local scanning.

I use Tenable SecurityCenter every day to scan our entire environment for vulnerabilities. I use a local license during the discovery process for penetration testing. So I'll do an en masse scan, and then also do a scan with Tenable to scan for IPs and vulnerabilities.

User-wise, with Tenable SecurityCenter, there's different roles. We have security analysts, admin, etc. I'd say there's probably four or five different roles from people that can just go in and view. Security analysts can upload manual scans and create dashboards and download reports. Then administrators can create accounts, assign roles and responsibilities, and things like that.

Tenable SecurityCenter has absolutely improved our organization, by making everything more secure and helping ensure solid vulnerability management.

The feature we've liked most recently was being able to take the YARA rules from FireEye and put them into Tenable's scan for the most recent SolarWinds exploit. That was really useful.

I'm pretty happy with it, but I do see a lot of stuff coming out about risk-based vulnerability management. And so I've been looking at that. I don't think we're using that as of yet and it seems like a newer feature they're talking about a lot that I'm interested in.

I will say it's a lot slower compared to an MS scan. It takes so much longer, so the performance could definitely be worked on.

There was also an issue with SecurityCenter once where we had agents deployed on each device, and while it was scanning we were collecting the data real time. During this process, we had an enclave that was not submitting. It didn't have the agent installed because it wasn't connected to the enterprise network.

They were scanning locally and submitting the scans and we would then upload them into SecurityCenter manually. Each time that there were any duplicates with host names or IPs, or that there were issues with the scanner device with authentication, it failed. But then you scanned it again and it was successful.

When you uploaded that, SecurityCenter was counting it as two devices. And when you ran your report for unauthorized devices, even though it was scanned a second time successfully, the first time would show as a failure. So it was throwing off reporting.

So we would run a report and say, "Okay, which device has failed scanning with authentication?" And it would give a device and we'd be like, "Well, here's the secondary scan showing that it was successful." And so we were having to manually go in there and delete the failed ones.

And that was a pain in the butt. We eventually got that enclave online so we fixed the problem, but I felt that was a limitation of Tenable SecurityCenter that it couldn't see that.

I have been using Tenable SecurityCenter for the past few years now.

We have only run into one troublesome issue that I can remember. It had to do with the way SecurityCenter inaccurately reported real-time scan results whenever there was a transient problem such as with a duplicate host name or IP, or with authentication.

It was a pain to deal with, because we kept having to go in and manually delete all the failed (but actually successful) scan results.

When it comes to scalability, so far so good, and no issues. We've got the whole environment monitored right now and I don't see any significant increases in use anytime soon.

Their technical support is good. Because I don't give out tens much for anything, I would say in the eight to nine range, out of ten.

For vulnerability management, Tenable SecurityCenter is the only one I've used in the past six years. Though we do use other tools in conjunction with it.

We've pretty much used Nessus for scanning, vulnerability management, and reporting, and that's it. And it does it very well. And then I use different tools for other things. I'm sure Tenable had that on the plugins for other things, but we don't use those.

The setup is straightforward.

I personally implement SecurityCenter with a local license. And then we also have different roles like security analysts and administrators who can just go in and perform various functions such as uploading manual scans, creating dashboards, downloading reports, assigning accounts, and so on.

I use a local license to perform penetration testing and I'm pretty happy with everything when it comes to pricing and licensing. 

I can easily recommend Tenable SecurityCenter, and I have nothing really bad to say about it. I think it's a great tool for what it does. I enjoy the webinars, and the people that run the company seem very engaged with what's going on when you're into current events and the overall security climate, and they're continuously looking to improve.

I can't speak to every option that they have, but I have no reservations recommending them.

I would rate Tenable SecurityCenter an eight out of ten.

The tool helps with vulnerability assessment and vulnerability management.

The tool gives us fewer false positives. Compared to its competitors, the solution’s reports are more accurate.

We experienced some difficulties with the solution’s support.

I have been working with the solution for two years. I use the tool’s latest version.

I would rate the tool’s stability a nine out of ten.

I would rate the tool’s scalability a ten out of ten. You can place sensors for the scanners and easily scale up.

I would rate the tool’s setup an eight out of ten. The tool’s deployment is very straightforward and it took only one day to deploy the solution. The solution’s deployment is simple and efficient.

I would rate the tool an eight out of ten. The tool has community support. From my experience of using the solution, I would recommend it to anyone looking to use it.

We use the solution for creating passwords and security scanning purposes.

The solution has been beneficial for our organization.

The solution serves as a good tool and is very user-friendly as well. It has many features. We are able to identify vulnerabilities in our systems, and ways to fix them with the solution’s help.

The solution is expensive. They should work on its pricing. 

We have been using the solution for six months.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. We have eleven users using the solution in our company that include Associates and Engineers. I rate the solution’s scalability as a ten.

The solution’s tech support team is very helpful.

Positive

We have an in-house team for installation.

I recommend the solution as it is a very good and user-friendly product. I rate it as a nine.

I primarily use this solution for vulnerability assessment on the assets that we have. This includes servers, network equipment, appliances, routers, firewalls, and switches. 

Before, we did manual management of our assets. We have an EXO file that has all our assets in it. They have the IP address and all the details of each equipment. We manually enrolled those assets to our vulnerability scanning tool for them to be scanned on a monthly basis and check what new vulnerabilities they may have. With the  Security Center, we are able to automate. We were able to automate how we enroll our assets in the Security Center, and the scheduling of when we scan each asset, and how we report them to respective system owners. We are trying to use it as a channel of a self-service platform to the system owners or system administrators. It helps to access the Security Center for them to review the vulnerabilities that the equipment or the servers may be assigned or under the domain.

We really love the Security Center dashboard. It performs vulnerability scanning and then outputs vulnerability data. When you are working with one, two, three, up to 10 IT pieces of equipment, managing the vulnerability data would just be fine, but when you are managing assets across an organization of 10,000+ employees, you have a really hard time normalizing those vulnerability data. The dashboard helps us out to map what things need to be prioritized, what is our current threat landscape and what would be the latest threats that we have in our network.

One of the challenges that we may have experienced with that platform would be the flexibility of how to modify or create. They have this configuration compliance audit function, so if ever an organization has their own configuration standards that should be set on their servers, you have to modify those plugins in Tenable for it to match the specific values that you are looking for when you perform the configuration assessment on your equipment. It is a small challenge because it uses regular expressions on their plugins and so we are having a hard time either creating a blank template from scratch. We usually base our compliance audit plugin on an existing one and then modify the values or describe whatever is not up to our standards. A good plugin editor is an additional option for the Security Center.

Whenever you have a vulnerability scan running of  5000 IP addresses all at the same time running, it tends to keep resources on the Tenable server itself, a huge amount of CPU and memory. Right now, it's still goes up, but at least it's below the threshold, which I think would be 73% or 75%.

As long as you can buy the license, you can easily add up until you need an additional scan engine.

We previously used Qualys Virtual Scanner Appliance.

Setup is easy as long as you have the right hardware requirements. The deployment took about a week. We used two network guys, two system admins, one application admin, and two security admins to implement the solution.

The longer process was on the hardening part of the components of the servers. We had to install everything on servers, all the dependencies, all of the software that Tenable needs, including the Security Center itself, and then once everything is installed, meaning everything is locked down, no other software is needed to be added to it. We performed a patch check and configuration checks on it to see they have met our standards. After that, we requested the connectivity performance from our firewall team and performed discovery across our network, if it will be able to see all the systems or all the IPs or all the networks that we have in our network. That would be one of the long processes that we took since there were a lot of different network segments that each engine or each Tenable component will pass through. We had to look for each one, just to make sure that we have the full coverage of our network.

We're able to save because we don't have to employ more staff members to help with the scheduling of the scans, running the reports or sending them out to the system owners. That alone is a big ROI. A massive security breach would cost us a lot. This is a preventative measure worth our investment.

Before, just preparing the monthly scans alone would take us about two weeks to set up. Then, we would have to wait for at least another two weeks for those assessments to be done, for the scanning to be done, and then it will take us about another two weeks to generate the report before we can send them out to the system owners. That's the reason why those were our main drivers, as well, for us to push the use of the Tenable Security Center as a self-service platform to the system owners. The quick turnaround time in terms of generating reports and sending them out to the respective system owners is significant.

I use SecurityCenter currently to investigate daily network security events from reports I receive. Our network support team uses it to track, manage, and remediate system vulnerabilities. It works well for the latter, not so much for the former.

In terms of vulnerability mitigation, SecurityCenter has worked quite well and is a perfect replacement for GFI LanGuard. Unfortunately, it's also being posed to my team as what we're supposed to use in place of ArcSight Express, which I've worked with for several years now.  SecurityCenter could be much more useful to our agency as a whole if it were configured better, but I'm not sure that the team that directly manages that system knows how to do that, or has the right licenses they need to bring in all of the data my team needs in SecurityCenter to make good use of it.  Basically, it comes down to two teams trying to use the same product for very different purposes, and while one team is pleased with the results, the other (mine) is not.

The 'raw syslog' search functions are fairly nice for tracking down debug info from an event, but it's usefulness is extremely low when compared with ArcSight in terms of its usefulness in network event investigations. SecurityCenter's strongest focus seems to be its vulnerability scanning, but I'm told I should be able to use it to replace ArcSight, and from experience with both products, I know that's not the case.  To be honest, if my mission were more aligned with our other team's goals, I might like SecurityCenter a lot more than I do; but as is, it's like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Security Center's vulnerability scanners are excellent in terms of compliance reporting, and the dashboards certainly seem to make the less technical of our staff all starry-eyed, but to be honest, I find SecurityCenter to be lacking in too many ways where my usage of it has been concerned.  Dashboards, to me, are much less interesting than a powerful and flexible query engine, and that's an area where I find SecurityCenter most lacking.

ArcSight Express; my employers sought a less expensive solution. If I'd had any sway on the decision, it wouldn't have happened, or at least, it would have happened differently.  The two products compliment each other well, but separately, they're designed with very different goals in mind.

No, I wasn't given the opportunity. SecurityCenter was brought in, vetted, and implemented by a separate team from the one I work with daily.

Know what you're getting into, and know the difference between security compliance suites and SIEM suites. The two are very different, which is why I'm very unhappy using SecurityCenter, because it's been forced upon me as a replacement for a product that it doesn't even compete with.

I primarily use Tenable for scanning and reporting.

Tenable's most valuable features are the credential scan, vulnerability reports, and vulnerability ratings (VPR).

Tenable has some problems with agents going offline during scanning and lag between agents and the security center. In the next release, Tenable should include automated patching and integration with SSCM so missing patches can be pushed from there.

Tenable is stable.

I'm satisfied with Tenable's technical support.

Positive

The initial setup was easy.

Tenable is open-source.

I would rate Tenable eight out of ten.

Essentially we use the solution to monitor hard devices on a network with it. That includes laptops, desktops, tablets, et cetera. I'm just using that to make sure that all of our patching is up to date.

The UI, the user interface, is really, really good. It's really simple. I started with no prior experience in vulnerability management and picked it up in less than a day, pretty quickly. It's very intuitive.

Their overall cost of service is pretty good. 

I've worked with my CS manager and with them a lot, and I'd say every case I've opened, they've reached out to me within two hours. They're pretty prompt in their responses and overall the company is really easy to get ahold of.

Scaling the solution is very easy.

The stability of the product is pretty good.

The biggest issue I have with the solution is when I'm using the scanning it picks up the original DNS of that device. That means, before we image it and actually change the DNS to something within our company structure, it'll just be random numbers and letters and Tenable will stick to that DNS for a long time. I'll be searching for a gallery or a laptop and I can't find it due to the fact that the DNS when it was scanned went in as something non-sensical, like M P X 23 Z. That's the biggest issue I have with it. it's some sort of strange glitch.

While I started using the solution in January of last year, the company itself has been on the solution for about three years or so.

The stability of the solution has been quite good. I haven't experienced any real problems so far. It's been a rather smooth proess.

Scaling the solution would be pretty simple. The process would require us to reach out to Tenable to get more licenses, however, that's a pretty simple process. Overall, it's pretty easy. Essentially it'd just be adding a list of all the new IPs into any asset groups that they would be involved in. I don't think it would take much longer than a week.

Technical support is excellent. They are extremely responsive and very helpful. We are quite satisfied with the level of support we've received from them.

I would give them a ten out of ten. They are very prompt and very knowledgeable. They are great at answering questions and walking you through anything step-by-step.

When I started, the company was actually in the process of revamping the solution. 

It was a two-day process and the company walked us through the entire thing. I had a Tenable engineer on-call with me for eight hours. It was a long process, however, it was easy as they were walking me through it, step-by-step.

When we did a recent re-vamp, Tenable was on hand to walk us through the entire process. We had a very positive experience with them.

I don't handle the billing and therefore don't have an exact idea of how much the solution costs.

We just renewed the solution and didn't look into any other product on the market before we did.

We are just customers and end-users of the product.

If a company does decide to implement the solution, I'd advise working with Tenable engineers during the process, and even afterward, in order to ensure everything is set up appropriately.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten We've had a largely very positive experience with the solution so far.

Tenable SC can be used in any company for vulnerability management life cycle.

It's a very useful tool.

Internal ticketing systems require improvement. 

The GUI could be improved to have all concerns and priorities use the same GUI, allowing them to see all tickets, assign vulnerabilities, and assign variation failures to each member of their team.

I have been working with Tenable SC for more than five years.                                                             

Tenable SC is very stable.

According to the sizing that we are dealing with in this first stage, it is very scalable.

We have not experienced any issues with the scalability of Tenable SC.

The information security team has access to the solution. The number of users varies from one environment to another. It ranges, from five users to ten users maximum.

The same number of users can easily deploy and maintain this solution, included the access manager, administrator, and anyone who can configure the policies they test.

Tenable technical support is very good. They are very helpful, and responsive.

We had experienced some delays in two or three tickets we started, but that may have been because of the client, they were very unresponsive.

Overall, the technical support is very good.

I have worked with Rapid 7 and Qualys.

The installation is very straightforward. It's the easiest solution that I have ever implemented.

The installation was quick, taking no more than one or two minutes.

I completed the installation myself. It can easily be installed by anyone.

The license is perpetual and is based on the number of IP addresses you want to scan in your organization.

The support comes with a different license.

Tenable SC is without a doubt a good choice.

I would rate Tenable SC a nine out of ten.