Avalor Data Fabric for Security

I am familiar with Unified Vulnerability Management through Tenable, which serves as my primary tool and playground. Unified Vulnerability Management is a universal vulnerability management tool. I have been using Tenable AI, Tenable AD, and Tenable IO for more than eight to nine years, approaching close to ten years of experience.

I worked for TD Synnex, the largest distributor in the USA and globally. In my role as a senior cyber security architect, I implemented their Unified Vulnerability Management application across approximately 9,000 servers with global operations. I also worked for Caterpillar as a data security admin level four, which is the highest level of engineering role beside the America Tech. I found that they used vulnerability tools including Tenable and other vulnerability management solutions. Based on my understanding of the rhythm of business, I applied Unified Vulnerability Management principles and evaluated their capabilities from an engineering perspective.

During my experience with Unified Vulnerability Management at TD Synnex in 2022, I was involved when they merged two large organizations, Tech Data and Synnex, becoming TD Synnex with approximately twenty organizations altogether. I was responsible for the merger and acquisition program, and I proposed implementing Unified Vulnerability Management from the root with the new application. I rebuilt their naming convention, which was a substantial task, and discovered many gaps in the process.

From Unified Vulnerability Management, credential scanning emerged as the most significant feature. Credential scanning identifies when someone attempts to log in to our network from outside, a capability that no other application recognizes. If someone tries to log in inside our network from outside, it will not be recognized by any other application, but Unified Vulnerability Management, especially through credential scanning, recognizes and prevents the operation.

Credential scanning is important for Unified Vulnerability Management as it serves as the first line of defense against hackers attempting to enter your network. From my role as a cybersecurity design architect, this capability is crucial. Most EDR, XDR, and other protection tools may not catch these sophisticated attacks because hackers use AI and different methodologies to gain access. They act as real users, injecting usernames and passwords, which can easily compromise credentials and allow them inside the network. Other tools cannot detect such activity, which is why I focus intently on this and secured my credential environment.

Unified Vulnerability Management is a very important part of my security strategy. My understanding shows that I have worked with many complete security postures, and vulnerability management is one of my areas of expertise. I believe that Unified Vulnerability Management is the backbone of any organization's security posture.

Unified Vulnerability Management means a comprehensive security approach that combines vulnerability discovery, assessment, prioritization, remediation, validation, and reporting into a single centralized program platform. I can secure servers, workstations, network devices, and cloud resources including Azure, AWS, and GCP, especially from an American market perspective. It also includes applications, APIs, containers, Kubernetes, mobile devices, IoT, and DevOps elements. Unified Vulnerability Management prioritizes vulnerability scans to detect CVEs, ensuring continuous monitoring and assessment, tracking remediation progress, and automating patch deployment. It integrates threat intelligence and complies with standards including NIST CSF, 853, CIS control, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and HIPAA.

The features I rely on most day-to-day in Unified Vulnerability Management are asset discovery, vulnerability management, patching, remediation, and threat intelligence. These are the most significant aspects for me. Additionally, I work to reduce security tool sprawl, achieve faster remediation patching, improve compliance readiness, enhance risk-based decision-making, and maintain visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

I have used various solutions including Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management, Tenable One, Rapid7, InsightVM, and CrowdStrike Falcon for vulnerability management. Additionally, I also utilize Wiz for cloud vulnerability management tools.

Unified Vulnerability Management has centralized the process of identifying, assessing, prioritizing, remediating, and monitoring vulnerabilities across my organization's entire IT ecosystem through a single integrated platform and governance framework, making this the most significant advantage.

I observe that Unified Vulnerability Management provides significant asset discovery, vulnerability scanning, and the capability to detect vulnerable CVEs, ensuring continuous monitoring and assessment that creates alerts if anything occurs. It also uses risk prioritization based on CVSS scores, threat intelligence, exploit availability, and business impact while emphasizing patching prioritized exploiting vulnerabilities.

I believe Unified Vulnerability Management can improve by emphasizing continuous monitoring, which necessitates a dashboard for users. Creating more mobility, especially since many incidents occur outside regular hours, would be beneficial. If anything goes wrong, a mobile version or mobile dashboard could be extremely helpful. Mobility is now a mandatory capability, allowing users to manage vulnerabilities through mobile applications.

Beyond mobility for Unified Vulnerability Management, more flexibility is also required. For example, vulnerability scanners routinely scan and create reports. It would be beneficial if I could create a runbook so that if any unwanted events occur, it generates alerts and stops operations. This would create a complete package for secure posture and management, allowing me to protect not just through scans but also through prevention.

I have been working with Unified Vulnerability Management for more than eight to nine years, approaching close to ten years of experience.

Unified Vulnerability Management is stable and should be since organizations are investing heavily. As a cybersecurity engineer, I prefer more than one tool, especially EDR and XDR, to ensure dual protection as any failure could jeopardize your entire business. Using two tools instead of one provides an extra layer of security for the environment, especially within enterprises.

Unified Vulnerability Management demonstrates scalability. For instance, I currently manage 9,000 servers while only purchasing licenses for 3,000 applications, enabling me to expand from 9,000 to 12,000 servers when needed without disruption.

Customer support varies. After COVID, I find customer support lacking, and I am not sure why the principals do not prioritize it more. They focus on technology but also created community sites for users to ask questions, which often provides automated responses for common queries. For new issues, there might be a delay in receiving help, and sometimes it involves answering machines when calling for support, which can be frustrating. I believe OEM should consider refining their support strategies, employing better AI agents that can cover frequent questions and enhance their response to users.

I previously used other solutions before Unified Vulnerability Management, particularly Tenable products including Tenable, Tenable IO, and Tenable vulnerability management for vulnerability scans.

Before using Unified Vulnerability Management, I evaluated options including Azure Security Center, Microsoft Defender, Qualys, and Splunk, integrating these to enhance capabilities for vulnerability management. My primary focus is on Microsoft and Tenable, with limited use of Microsoft Defender vulnerability management before switching.

I observe that Unified Vulnerability Management leads to significant returns on investment, in which automation reduces the need for human intervention. I can configure everything to operate on schedule; therefore, no need for manual operation is required. Everything scans automatically, creates reports, and generates ServiceNow tickets for remediation. It becomes a hands-free application that streamlines my processes greatly.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is not directly managed by me; however, I strongly recommend Tenable as I view it as a prime vulnerability management application worldwide. Even when comparing other tools, I vote for Tenable because they continuously research and tackle challenges faced by many organizations. Pricing-wise, vulnerability management generally involves two types of models: one for licensing individual devices and another for environments. It is advantageous as you may not need licenses for all 9,000 servers but can effectively manage and scan even with fewer licenses for prioritized servers.

My advice to others looking into Unified Vulnerability Management is to consider Tenable One as my first choice. I tend to favor Tenable and its different use cases. For example, Microsoft Defender is advantageous only within Microsoft platforms, whereas Wiz is beneficial for cloud-only environments. Given more comprehensive needs, Tenable One stands out as compatible with most infrastructures. ServiceNow has a vulnerability response function, but I have limited experience with that. I have also looked into CrowdStrike, particularly their Exposure Management, but I have not explored it fully as it is newly released.

Every technology is developing rapidly, and there is a growing emphasis on AI within this evolution. Just three years ago, AI was not as prevalent, but now it significantly enhances productivity and efficiency. However, it represents a double-edged sword; while largely beneficial, AI can also create risks. It learns from inputs, and if anyone employs bad prompts within an enterprise context, they might expose vulnerabilities without recognizing it. Therefore, I need to safeguard AI use alongside utilizing DLP systems to protect such instances, ensuring protective measures are in place for any potentially harmful inquiries made to AI.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten based on my overall experience.

My main use case for Unified Vulnerability Management is to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities effectively. We have a unique workflow that helps streamline our vulnerability management process.

Unified Vulnerability Management has positively impacted my organization by improving our response time to vulnerabilities significantly. Our average response time was reduced by 40%, and we have seen measurable improvements in our security posture.

The best features Unified Vulnerability Management offers include comprehensive scanning and detailed reporting.

The risk-based prioritization helps my team by allowing us to focus on the most critical vulnerabilities first.

One aspect that stands out is the user-friendly interface, though there are enhancements I wish it had.

I believe Unified Vulnerability Management can be improved by refining its reporting capabilities.

I would particularly like to see enhancements related to the user interface to make navigation even easier.

I have been using Unified Vulnerability Management for a significant time in my organization.

My advice for others looking into using Unified Vulnerability Management is to fully understand their specific needs and tailor the implementation accordingly. Overall, I have found it to be an invaluable tool in our security arsenal. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.

Unified Vulnerability Management is used for vulnerability management, involving finding vulnerabilities on devices and providing recommendations. Based on these recommendations, we manually check the vendor pages for the necessary patches and version upgrades, and that work is manual, as we are not using any software for it.

In Unified Vulnerability Management, the best features include the ability to consolidate each and every device without dependency on other patch vulnerability management software, such as Qualys and SolarWinds, which have limited modules. It can work on both web and on-premises servers through a single centralized module that scans all platforms, including cloud and Software-as-a-Service, and can assess vulnerabilities related to TLS and DTLS, while on-premises scanning is also possible with a simple connector.

We have configured automated scanning in Unified Vulnerability Management, but we also take precautions during this process. We implement temporary firewall blocks for specific ports that could damage the product, such as Portwide, which acts like a trojan; thus, we maintain limited automation, scanning for a specific duration on particular TCP ports within a determined IP range. The software includes an exclude option, which we utilize to avoid certain IP addresses or URLs.

I can assess the ability to generate customizable compliance reports as effective; internally, it includes a tool, and if necessary, we export these reports into CSV format. Once in CSV format, we use Power BI for graphical presentation to stakeholders.

In Unified Vulnerability Management, the area that needs improvement is DNS-level security, which has been lacking for the last ten years. Other vendors, such as Cloudflare and Netskope, excel in DNS-level security that is crucial for reducing bandwidth utilization. With Unified Vulnerability Management, since we send all data to their cloud, we utilize internet bandwidth; ideally, blocking at the DNS level means only sending DNS queries to the cloud, conserving bandwidth. Competitors in ZTNA vulnerability management such as Cloudflare, Netskope, and Cisco Umbrella have better capability in this area.

I have around eight years of experience using Unified Vulnerability Management.

Currently, the stability of Unified Vulnerability Management is commendable; after evaluating two or three products, we selected Unified Vulnerability Management, and following deployment, it has remained stable, which I rate as ten out of ten for stability.

Regarding scalability, I find it excellent; whenever required, we can deploy in AWS or other platforms. Even though we currently do not use AWS extensively, we could easily integrate it if we need more VMs, employing a straightforward, single-time token-based authentication to connect to the cloud.

I rate the technical support at Unified Vulnerability Management as very good; they respond immediately when I call for assistance. If necessary, they escalate issues to senior staff, and I have seen R&D personnel come and help us with problems, such as fixing certificate issues during calls. I give the support a rating of ten.

In terms of return on investment, I estimate it at around thirty percent annually. In a five-year period, we can see a full payback; for instance, comparing the cost with vendors such as Secureworks, hiring them for monthly scanning would yield higher expenses than maintaining Unified Vulnerability Management. Thus, we save around thirty to forty percent over five years.

I would compare Unified Vulnerability Management with other solutions and rank it around eight or eight point nine, definitely not reaching nine. Qualys is a good product in this space, but the challenge with Qualys is that multiple modules need to be purchased.

For a review, I can provide solutions such as Unified Vulnerability Management, Fortigate, Palo Alto firewall, and based on Gartner, I can see that Forescout is also a notable mention.

We do use Unified Vulnerability Management.

We have used the remediation workflow tools, but we do not fully trust auto-remediation. First, we manually validate whether it is truly a vulnerability or just a false positive alert because sometimes the version indicates a vulnerability, yet there is an available patch for that version. In those cases, we can exclude it manually, so there is no necessity to upgrade certain applications or servers. These false positive vulnerability logs do arise, and we manually filter those before applying changes to avoid potential outages. For instance, this week we focus on critical vulnerabilities, while in the next fifteen days, we will address high vulnerabilities, then move on to medium and low vulnerabilities, which we will prioritize only after more than ninety days.

The integration capabilities notably influence our security strategy, as we have it integrated with Microsoft Defender, a scanner that provides critical input. We also utilize a DLP solution and a CASB solution, using ChatGPT and Copilot, with the current integration being mainly with Windows Defender.

Risk-based prioritization is vital for resource allocation; for instance, we treat a CVE of ten as critical, and anything from nine point eight down to eight is considered critical. Between eight and seven is high, while below that becomes medium and low. Vulnerabilities rated six or seven are not acted upon urgently, while we respond immediately to vulnerabilities rated at ten and nine, aiming to fix them within the next fifteen days. During our quarterly scans, if we find three or four vulnerabilities across twenty to twenty-four different assets, we allocate tasks to the respective owners, providing them with the remediation steps and necessary patch details for formal change requests.

Regarding the pricing for Unified Vulnerability Management, it is definitely not cheap; when compared to Qualys, it is more reasonable. It ranks high among the best software available, nearly matching the price of the Gartner number one product, which is Qualys. Rapid7 is also present, and it is lesser in cost than Unified Vulnerability Management.

We have deployed Unified Vulnerability Management in both cloud and on-premises environments.

I have been working with Unified Vulnerability Management products for a total of ten years, and specifically, we have been using the Unified Vulnerability Management scanning product for about four years. We initially checked it in two thousand nineteen and purchased it for five years back then, marking our experience with the product from its first stage.

My overall rating for this product is nine out of ten.

For me, the most appealing aspect of Unified Vulnerability Management for a customer or potential customer is the functionality. It is the grouping of numerous inputs into the solution.

Unified Vulnerability Management collects information from other products and aggregates that information. The other products are the ones that perform all the scanning. Unified Vulnerability Management takes all of those inputs, bundles them into one platform. For instance, I have an antivirus solution that collects information about my workstations and provides the workstation name. I also have a vulnerability management solution that collects information about that laptop. Unified Vulnerability Management joins them all together using the key that is the laptop name and combines all that information from different sources.

I cannot answer what could be improved about Unified Vulnerability Management because I have not implemented it. I am not in a position to give feedback.

I cannot comment on what other features or functionality I would like to see included in Unified Vulnerability Management because I do not know the price of the product, so I cannot comment on whether it is competitive in the market space. I have not done an analysis of that. All I have done is keep abreast of the technology as an architect, but nothing further.

I have known about Unified Vulnerability Management since it was first launched because Zscaler bought into this product during their initial roadshows. That was approximately two to three years ago.

I have no idea how stable Unified Vulnerability Management is. If I must provide a number, I would rate the stability as five because I have no idea.

Zscaler's technical support is responsive and helpful.

I have not implemented Unified Vulnerability Management. The only tool that I have is Zscaler Internet Access.

I have not gone any further than initial awareness regarding Unified Vulnerability Management. I must admit that I did not know they even had an on-premises version.

I have no idea if there were any challenges or complexities with the implementation of Unified Vulnerability Management because I have not deployed it.

I suspect that Unified Vulnerability Management can generate customizable reports, but since I have not implemented it, I do not know.

From my perspective, I use an antivirus solution and a vulnerability management solution. I also have a CMDB, so I already have those. Unified Vulnerability Management could potentially be my CMDB, but I do not know.

My understanding is that Unified Vulnerability Management integrates with a number of known vendors that are in the marketplace, popular and common vendors. Therefore, I am guessing that the integration will work, but not having deployed it, I do not know.

I cannot rate Unified Vulnerability Management in general from one to ten because I have not implemented the product. Conceptually, I think Unified Vulnerability Management is a great idea, but I do not know if it delivers. I can only tell the marketing information and not the real-life information.

My overall review rating for Unified Vulnerability Management is five.

We integrated Unified Vulnerability Management with the FortiGate firewall, and as of now, there are no challenges found. It is very easy to implement Unified Vulnerability Management with the FortiGate firewall.

The best feature of Unified Vulnerability Management is that it never shows actual details publicly and provides different virtual information to those coming from outside the company. It does not give any actual information about any companies, making it very safe for any organization to protect their networks, which is why it is in high demand right now.

Improvements are necessary because Unified Vulnerability Management has been in the market for only seven or eight years, and a lot of improvement must be required for performance. Automatic scaling is needed, especially since sometimes a data center can be down, particularly in certain geographical locations.

I have been familiar with Unified Vulnerability Management for around five years, and as of 2020, it has been almost six years.

Regarding implementation, I can say it is moderate, not easy and not very difficult. It should be a knowledgeable person who can deploy it easily, but for a non-knowledgeable person, it is difficult. I did not face any problems.

Deployment for Unified Vulnerability Management may take a couple of months after planning, which takes about one and a half months. After planning, the deployment is a one-day job. Impact analysis, reviewing changes, and risk analysis take time, but with proper planning, the job for deployment will take one day.

Currently, for Unified Vulnerability Management implementation, there are five members taking care of the operations and three members for the monitoring.

I purchased Unified Vulnerability Management directly from Zscaler, not from AWS Marketplace.

We do use automated scanning, and it will generate a report if any of our organization's assets have some unauthorized software that is non-compliant. Based on the report, we will work on understanding why it is non-compliant and what the reason is for its installation on end user assets, and we will mitigate that.

I have not yet used Unified Vulnerability Management's remediation workflow tools, but we are working on it right now as that project is ongoing.

About pricing, it is higher compared to others because Unified Vulnerability Management is demanding and more secure than other products since it does not give actual information of the customer, so it is a bit expensive. Organizations should choose to work on the pricing.

I rate this solution an 8 out of 10.