Tenable Security Center Reviews

Vulnerability assessment and compliance auditing are our primary use cases. That includes baseline configuration scanning. We use it to protect everything in the enterprise environment: servers, workstations, pretty much all operating systems, networking gear. We are doing cloud and we are doing some IOT. We are not using their web application scanning tool.

The ability to view the plug-ins, the way that the plug-in library works, is really good. It's not an individual list of 80 million different CVEs. We can actually just say, "Hey, here's a plug-in," and it really helps us to boil things down. Instead of having a million CVEs, here's the specific plug-ins that are actually tying the CVE families together. That helps our platform owners, if there is an issue, to see what it is and understand better how to fix it.

Also, the fact that they display the very specific plug-in output in their details area helps our platform owners know, if there's an issue, specifically what was checked and what versions it was on at the time of the test. That's just huge. It increases the trust in the information from the tool. It cuts down on accusations of false-positives and it helps people do their job better.

It helps us to understand our cyber-exposure. At the end of the day, if you don't know what you have, then you cannot defend against it. Understanding what services, what technologies, and all those components will also give us an idea about how to predict what kinds of attacks are the things that we need to guard against in the future.

It also helps us focus resources on the vulnerabilities that are most likely to be exploited. Looking at what actually has an exploit available along with consideration of other things such as network proximity times and information about the threat - either VPR or CVSS - pulling all that together does allow us to identify pretty quickly what are the high-priority targets that we should work on.

One of the most valuable features is their distributed scan model for allotting engines to work together as a pool and handle multiple scans at once, across multiple environments. Automatic scanning distribution is a distinguishing feature of their toolset.

Also, the ability to trend data back as far back as we have disk space for, is helpful.

Finally, the ability to write custom audit files is a really helpful and useful feature. That's something that not a lot of assessment companies have gotten right. There's room for improvement, but literally being able to take the text file, open it up, and adjust the changes, write your own regex and write your own checks, is huge.

It's good at creating information, it's good creating dashboards, it's good at creating reports, but if you want to take that reporting metadata and put it into another tool, that is a little bit lacking. It does great for things for the API. For instance, if we say, "What vulnerabilities do we have?" or "How many things have we scanned?" those things are great. But if we want to know more trending stuff over time, it can create a chart, but that's in a format which is really difficult to get into another program. Integration into other reporting platforms, or providing more specific scanning program metadata, would be an opportunity.

It does have a fully-bolstered API which is available online that you can look at, but it is more aimed at getting more vulnerability information out instead of reporting information out.

We've had more problems with the underlying stuff that is running the operating system, as opposed to actually running Tenable. Tenable SecurityCenter has been pretty stable. We've only had one or two smaller technical issues. There have been other issues, but they've not been Tenable's fault.

It does have an upper limit. You can go on their website and see what their upper IP limit is.

We have seen that more and more teams want to get access to the data and get access to their vulnerability information, and it really has helped us grow our program.

Their tier-one, initial tech support is pretty bad. Their premium support is excellent. Whether premium support comes at an extra fee depends on how your negotiations go.

We migrated from Nexpose. We switched because Nexpose is not a scalable product for an enterprise. Also, in most instances, SecurityCenter is less false-positive prone and the detection seems to be better in most instances.

The initial setup was very straightforward. In fact, for some of our teams, we've actually done - "capture the flag" is a bad word for it - but effectively that type of an activity, and they pretty much go from naked box to Tenable scanning instances within a couple of hours. It's very easy to set up.

I can safely say that it can be deployed with one person. And it doesn't require a lot of maintenance. It depends on how much you use it for, but it's mostly just set-it-and-forget-it. Then there is just the mechanical stuff of patching the box and applying system updates, but it actually does a pretty good job most of the time.

We've seen return on investment through visibility, scan stability, ensuring that we're able to assess our environment. Also, ensuring that we are able to have good confidence in the data, and that we're able to do out-of-the-box reporting and various other dashboards that really help us drive our program and help sell our case.

We evaluated Qualys. It depends on whether you want to do on-prem or in the cloud. Qualys really is a black box. You literally put this thing on your network, you can't touch it, and if you want to do something like troubleshoot, it is just not very friendly from an "if things go wrong" perspective.

Make sure that your sizing is done correctly, in terms of the hardware size. When you do buy Tenable, a lot of times you'll use Professional Services to help you implement the tool. Whatever advice Tenable has, listen to it very specifically and also talk to them specifically about what your goals are. Instead of talking tactics, talk about goals. What's going to happen is that they may say "Hey, we're going to do things slightly differently than how you used to do it," but in a lot of instances, they're going to be right.

In terms of features that we're looking forward to, VPR is one that we're going to start using more. And they also recently had a SAML integration for single sign-on. That was a new feature in 5.9.

Overall, Tenable is easily a nine out of ten. It's not a ten because there is no perfect tool out there, and Tenable SecurityCenter does have its limitations.

I'm the one who scans and performs assessments on clinical and medical equipment in our environment. I manage the clinical endpoint devices: MRI systems, bedside monitoring, Alaris pumps, fusion pumps, CTUs, EEGs, EKGs, wireless defibrillators, and a lot of IP cameras that are part of operation room labs. My colleague handles all the regular enterprise IT, database servers, etc. From a scanning standpoint, I do everything from discovery scanning to full-credential auditing and anything and everything in between. That's just for the medical space in a 24/7 production medical environment.

We're also using a bit of the Passive Vulnerability Scanner and, eventually, I want to get to using the agents, but we haven't gotten to that stage yet.

My department is not enterprise-managed. We don't use like tools like SCCM to push out patches. Everything is manual updating. I need to be able to track and audit against our devices and know what exactly what Microsoft hotfixes I need to see. I need to identify what specific patches are missing on devices. Or, for example, there was a Microsoft CVE alert that was put out a couple of weeks ago for RDP, Remote Desktop Protocol. I'm using the scanner now to try to identify what devices we actually need to look at to address risk on. Including IP cameras for our different labs, I manage over 40,000 devices. So I really need to know what exactly I need to focus on for a given vulnerability, such as the Microsoft one, as they come about. Tenable really helps with the identification piece, in a way that traditional IT policies and procedures and tools cannot.

It saves me time. When I get into actually identifying impacted assets in my environment - and having to deal with fewer false positives - it could save me up to eight to ten hours a week, for things like the RDP issue we're dealing with now; for the things that really come out as priorities.

Security Center helps to limit our organization's cyber exposure. In our environment there is a lot of stuff we can't deal with in terms of endpoints, but it has definitely helped in identifying the devices we have out there which haven't had Microsoft updates applied in years, potentially. It's really helped identify those, the low-hanging fruit. But then, you get into the devices that are relatively up to date but their vendor application has been the same for however many years. In the least, we're able to identify and understand which devices those are and what the risks are, even if we can't immediately address it.

In terms of reducing the number of critical and high vulnerabilities we need to patch, it has helped me to identify them, and I address them accordingly. As I said, there is stuff we can't address, but at least it helps us identify them, and we are able to address some of them. It's helped us identify vulnerabilities and put in compensating controls and mitigating controls. It has definitely reduced the risk exposure we've had.

Also, rather than rely on high-level communication from vendors about whether or not their products may be impacted, I can use scans to actually identify what is impacted or in scope for a given vulnerability. It used to be, a couple of years ago, if I had to identify systems, I had to know at a high level if some of these devices could be impacted. It would create a lot of false positives. Since we've been using the scanner, I've been able to narrow that down quite a bit. I still get false positives, but I certainly get a lot fewer than I used to. It helps me have a more managed focus with any scope I'm looking at.

What is useful to me is being able to fulfill very customized scanning policies. In the clinical environment, because of vendor control, we can't perform credential-vulnerability scanning. And network scans, which I've done before, can cause a lot of impact. Being able to create very customized policies to be able to routinely scan and audit our clinical networks, while simultaneously not causing impact, is important to us. That requires a lot of flexibility in how we create the policies, so flexibility in policy-creation is a big feature. 

For me, another useful feature of the tool is the dashboard and reporting. That is a big piece for me. The reporting covers most of my needs.

In terms of integrations, so far, from what we've seen and for what we're trying to accomplish, it's been pretty flexible.

The Vulnerability Priority Rating is useful. I run scans on all of our medical equipment and we have stuff that's still Windows 2000. Equipment is so expensive to upgrade and replace. I find a lot of it shows up red for vulnerabilities that we really can't do anything about. The predictive stuff helps prioritize some of those risks. At a high level, it helps narrow that scope. There is still a lot of manual work on my end because, as I mentioned, I really have to know what equipment I'm looking at exactly from a medical standpoint. But it does help narrow the scope.

In terms of the reporting, it's good for IT tools, but it doesn't give me contextual insight into what device, what kind of medical equipment it is. And in my world, that's a big deal. That's a con, given what my needs are. We can't integrate it with our biomed database to correlate data. So I can know what vulnerabilities are on it by IP address, but it doesn't tell me what device it is. Is it an MRI or a workstation? Is it the workstation which is running MRI's or is it the one that's just pulling patient images? Things like that are things that I need to know, and usually the tool can't do that in and of itself. With that said, we do have some work toward some other integrations to try to improve some of that.

Also, I don't know of a process right now to do what I'll call mass risk-acceptance. I have thousands of devices which allow high and critical vulnerabilities and there's really not much I can do about it. But if we put a firewall in front of it, the risk of the whole device is accepted. I need to be able to accept all those risks in the tool. It's really not easy to do within my workflow at this time. There are ways to get around it, but they're not conducive to what I do in my work.

If I want to have a very low-managed scan policy, it's a lot of work to create something which is very basic. If I use a tool like Nmap, all I have to do is download it, install it, type in the command, and it's good to go. In Security Center, I have to go through a lot of work to create a policy that's very basic.

Finally, the way we're using it now, for routine scans, it's only good for as long as a device is active on the network. That's one of my biggest concerns at this time: What about the stuff I don't have access to on the network when it runs the scans?

We have quirks every now again. Sometimes, when I click into the analysis dashboard, I get errors. For example, it will say it can't pull up a specific query. I just let the problem persist. I can work around it and, eventually, it just seems to fix itself.

Beyond that, it's been pretty stable. We have a lot of firepower behind it and in my experience, it has always been up. There aren't that many operational issues with it.

When you throw in the Passive Vulnerability Scanner, just being able to spit out more hardware if we need it, it seems like it scales well, at least with respect to our environment. When we first had it, we only had a handful of servers powering it and scans took forever. I don't know how many servers we have on the back end powering it now, but it's a lot faster. We've added to it to give it more juice. That's been pretty easy and straightforward as well.

I don't generally talk to tech support. That's handled by my colleague or someone else in the security team. But I talked to them when I was at my previous organization where we used Security Center. From what I vaguely remember they were helpful.

We used Rapid7 Nexpose. In our view, Security Center is a more thorough tool. It has more plugins to scan against a lot of vulnerabilities, and it is a bit more granular. Overall, it's been a better tool to use.

As for the initial setup, that would be a tech question. The only thing I've set up is the Passive Vulnerability Scanner. That was pretty straightforward. When I got to the point of setting it up with Security Center, it took my colleague and me under an hour. That was just our first one. It's pretty straightforward once you know how to do it.

We have an enterprise issue, so for us to be able to capture all that is needed from the clinical side, we would have to have deployed it at every site. It's because there is a lot of Layer 2 traffic. Since we have Security Center centralized, traffic will route out. Since we have networks at the sites that don't route out, we can't scan that traffic remotely. The idea is to have one at each site but, because of the standards in our organization at this time, we can't do that.

It's less a question of ROI and more a question of cost avoidance, meaning avoiding the potential cost from having a vulnerable device that can be breached. Security is a sunk cost in any organization. You never truly know its value until you have an incident.

The pricing is more than Rapid7 Nexpose. PVS and the agents, etc., are all part of that agreement. So it's pretty comprehensive, but I don't know how much it is.

In my own work, I've used some open-source solutions like Nmap. I've messed around with Retina, another open-source solution. Most of the stuff I've used has been freeware, open-source tools. In terms of a commercial competitor, the one I've used most is Nexpose, Rapid7's tool.

One thing I liked about Rapid7 Nexpose, that Security Center does not have, is that when we scheduled scans in Rapid7 Nexpose, there was a graphical calendar that showed when scans are taking place. Security Center doesn't have that. It's a small thing, but it helps to visualize what's happening.

In my type of medical environment, when you get into an operational technology environment, PVS or something that's a passive scanner is more the way to go than something that actively goes out and scans and tries to interrogate endpoints, because that can cause impact. When dealing with the healthcare space or, say, the electrical grid, the consequences can be very widespread or can cause significant impact. Something like PVS is a great idea to look into.

If you're scanning operational technology, definitely use connectionless-oriented discovery policies. For example, perform UDP scans instead of TCP scans. From my experience, TCP scans have definitely brought down systems.

When it comes to insight, it helps but, the way we're using it now, scans only pick up what's active on the network, while the scan is occurring. For my environment, I perform most of my scans overnight, so I'm missing a lot of stuff that is used during the day in the clinical environment. That includes point-of-care devices, ultrasonography, and some other stuff. I don't scan the networks during the day, for the most part, so I do miss a lot of that stuff. PVS, the passive scanner, would pick up on a lot of that. When talking about actually detecting intrusion, I think it would be more powerful if we're able to get it deployed everywhere.

Two people in our organization actively use it for a lot of scanning. Some of the other security guys use it, but for the most part, it's just my colleague and I who use it. I have my scheduled, routine scans that run automatically and there are the scans I schedule for overnight. I run discovery scans daily. I run my vulnerability audit scans every other month. I'm doing the RDP scans now. I log into it daily and I run scans in it several times a week manually, outside of the scheduled scans. I use it heavily.

Right now there is just one person who manages the solution. I handle some of the PVS stuff but it's my colleague who is running the show.

Overall, I would give Security Center a nine out of ten. Of all the tools I've used, when it comes to managing the vulnerabilities and risks of a whole enterprise environment, I don't think I've used a better tool than Security Center. The reason I say nine and not a ten, is because I like to have a lot of control. When I use a Nmap, I'm able to write my own scripts. Security Center has a lot of that built-in, but I feel like there's very deep and more granular control once you know how to use some of the open-source tools out there.

The primary use case is to perform vulnerability assessments across the entire network.

This solution has given us visibility of the vulnerability in our network. It also shows what needs to be done to negate the vulnerabilities by providing links to the solution for those issues. Generally, we are now able to manage our vulnerabilities better. We can identify them, prioritize them, and then negate them. It has improved our security posture.

The most valuable feature is its ability to scan for vulnerabilities in our important systems, networks devices, and so on.

The web application scanning area can be improved.

A feature that I would like to see is the ability to integrate with exploit tools. 

It's a really stable solution. So far, I have not had any issues. Once it was installed it was very stable, very few bugs. It has topped expectations.

It's easily scalable. If you are required to scan more assets then you just request for it to be expanded, such as from two thousand to five thousand. Scalability is not an issue.

The system is used by around thirty-five users including system admins, who ensure that the system is up, and the application admins who are responsible for fixing the issues that are picked up with the solution.

We use it across our entire network so we cannot expand its use any further.

Their technical support is quite good, and they're very responsive. If there is any issue they perform quite quickly. Also, the local partner is well versed in the solution so they give us the support we need.

We did not use a solution prior to this one.

The initial setup, including the GUI, is very straightforward.

The implementation took about three months, and then the maturation took about six months.

We have about two people for maintenance.

We were working with a local partner for the deployment.

We have seen ROI for this solution. It has reduced our security vulnerabilities. Even during the national audit, one of the findings is that this solution is helping us be more productive. We're able to find these issues before somebody else finds them. We can fix them before they are discovered by others.

The licensing costs for this solution are approximately $100,000 US, and I think that covers everything.

Before choosing this solution we evaluated Qualys Labs and Rapid7.

This is a good solution for evaluating vulnerability in the network. It gives wide coverage, and it is able to scan most platforms on the network.

I would rate this product an eight out of ten.

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.

Basically it reviews our threat landscape vulnerability. So, we just want to be sure that we check compliance in terms of our configuration and compliance to our policies. But, the key is to make sure that we are not exposed to vulnerabilities that can be exploited. So, it's more of just securing our threat landscape.

It easily detects issues, and alarms the site.

One valuable feature is the Assurance Report Card. with the Assurance Report Card, we are able to give our overview about security posters in just a glance. And with a report to cut this we can quickly, our executives can quickly consume that without going into the difficulties of the vulnerability issue.

In terms of the configuration of the reports, there's some level of flexibility that we are not able to achieve. In terms of configuring the reports to achieve certain percentages and all of that. So, that's really the main thing I've noticed. But, apart from that, I think it's one of the best vulnerability management tools I've used, in terms of giving us the full visibility into the environment.

One to three years.

There were no crashes, or anything of that sort. The solution is stable. At times, we have had the typical bugs, but it's not something I would say is a big deal. It is maybe once in a quarter--insignificant.

I did not have any issues with scalability. This is because once you scope the main control, the Security Center box, you do proper saving on the main box in terms of storage. Initially, when we did the first installation, we did not properly size our storage. So, we quickly entered issues. But, since it was  Linux box, we were able to reconfigure and make development for additional storage. Once we did that, there has not been anything that tested the scalability. So, when the growth becomes a little high, we just add a box and provide a scanner. Then, you define the territory within which you can scan, because each scanner can be assigned to a given territory in terms of sub-nets, and so on.

The tech support was fairly good enough. I would not rate them as top-notch, but it was fairly good enough. I would give it a rating between 70-80%.

I considered Rapid7 Nexpose and Metasploit in the past.

It was pretty straightforward.

It is slightly more expensive than other solutions in the same sphere.

If you are considering a product like this, you must take into account and properly plan, scope, and scan. You need to know how to properly place your scanners and how to schedule automatic scans. You need to properly schedule your scans, so for example you don't need to scan your data center during that day when your business is most active, you can schedule your scans to run in the middle of the night, when your systems are least active.

If you wake up on LAN, then you can even scan clients during the night. You schedule wake up on LAN, your boxes are woken up on LAN, then the scanning is run, and then the boxes are shut down once the scan is over. So that's proper scoping and planning with this solution.

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.sc to search availability and for our workstation server and data center.

Tenable.sc's best features are the availability model, accident management, and scoring. It also gives fewer false positives than its competitors.

Tenable.sc's user interface could be improved.

I've been using Tenable.sc for about two months.

Tenable.sc is very stable.

Tenable.sc is scalable.

Tenable's technical support is good.

The initial setup was easy as we use the cloud version.

Tenable.sc is more expensive than its competitors.

I would give Tenable.sc a rating of eight out of ten.