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	Issue TOC Print full article Print this page E-Mail this URL Discuss this article Flame the author     In this article Introduction Wants & Needs Foundstone Enterprise and FoundScan Engine 2.6 Qualys QualysGuard Intranet Scanner Harris Corp. STAT Scanner Professional Edition 5 eEye Digital Security Retina Network Security Scanner Vigilante.com SecureScan NX 2.6.50 SAINT 4.3 nCircle Network Security IP360 Vulnerability Management System 5.3 Other Products Reviewed How We Tested Web Links Report Card

FoundScan was one of the most polished products we tested. Its management interface is clean, understandable and relatively stable, though we did lock up several times during invasive scans. We especially liked being able to restrict user access, allowing multiple levels of administrative control. This feature fits well with a product that also offers a ticketing system for remediation of identified vulnerabilities.

Although Foundstone didn't offer much in the way of data export, its HTML reports were clean, relatively easy to understand and could be sorted in a variety of ways, letting administrators efficiently view reports. Furthermore, because the scanner writes directly to a Microsoft SQL Server, organizations can build their own reports by directly accessing the system's databases.

What this product lacks in reporting it makes up for with its remediation ticketing system, which lets enterprises share the "vulnerability joy" among network and security administrators. The only other product we saw with this type of system was eEye's Retina. Unfortunately, these ticket systems don't integrate with other helpdesk/trouble-ticket software.

Foundstone allows a great deal of flexibility for tuning performance. VA administrators can change the total number of concurrent threads, the overall scan acceleration, the packet interval and the total number of scan objects allowed. Although we found the defaults solid for the test group we were scanning, performance can be adjusted to scan a larger test group more efficiently.