BeyondTrust Network Security Scanner, powered by Retina (Legacy) vs. Salt Project

Retina Network Security Scanner is well suited for any environment and infrastructure that would like to expose security deficiencies across their network as well as visualize vulnerabilities as they pertain to assets in their environment. I cannot think of any scenario that would not be appropriate for this product. Since the product carries over to pretty much all assets in your environment, I don't know off the top of y head what it wouldn't be appropriate for.

Incentivized

SaltStack is a very well architected toolset and framework for reliably managing distributed systems' complexity at varied scale. If the diversity of kind or number of assets is low, or the dependencies are bounded and simple, it might be overkill. Realization that you need SaltStack might come in the form of other tools, scripts, or jobs whose code has become difficult, unreliable, or unmaintainable. Rather than a native from-scratch SaltStack design, be aware that SaltStack can be added on to tools like Docker or Chef and optionally factor those tools out or other tools into the mix.

Incentivized

• Besides the fact that Retina NSS performs the fundamental task of scanning all my network devices, one of the main strengths is the speed at which it scans. Time is money and I know people tent to wear that cliché out a bit, but when you are as small as we are of a team, every minute counts.
• We have utilized other network security scanners over the past 21 years and Retina NSS seems to have the smallest footprint with no evidence of scanning degrading performance of the devices scanned.
• They seem to update their database frequently enough that we notice a correlation of threats to discovery.
• There is a small learning curve, but overall, a seasoned IT professional can quickly get up and running in a few hours and get usable results quickly. This falls back on the speed at which Retina NSS scans. My previous network security scanners would sometimes take hours to complete a full vulnerability scan of between 250 - 400 devices, now it only takes a fraction of that time.

Incentivized

• Targeting is easy and yet extremely granular - I can target machines by name, role, operating system, init system, distro, regex, or any combination of the above.
• Abstraction of OS, package manager and package details is far advanced beyond any other CRM I have seen. The ability to set one configuration for a package across multiple distros, and have it apply correctly no matter the distrospecific naming convention or package installation procedure, is amazing.
• Abstraction of environments is similarly valuable - I can set a firewall rule to allow ssh from "management", and have that be defined as a specific IP range per dev, test, and prod.

Incentivized

• I do not have any obvious cons to report at this time.

Incentivized

• Managing network hardware should be more native and easy
• SaltStack should buffer jobs and, when a client returns, make sure it is executed proberly
• SaltStack should provide basic pillar and states structures to help get newbies started

Incentivized

We haven't had to spend a lot of time talking to support, and we've only had one issue, which, when dealing with other vendors is actually not that bad of an experience.

Retina Network Security Scanner is the only product we have used in our enterprise. I have used a product in the past called GFI LanGuard Network Security Scanner and while it did perform the functions of vulnerability testing, etc...it just wasn't nearly as refined as Retina NSS. It was slow and was not as lightweight as Retina as far as end-user detection.

Incentivized

We moved to SaltStack from Puppet about 3 years ago. Puppet just has too much of a learning curve and we inherited it from an old IT regime. We wanted something we could start fresh with. Our team has never looked back. SaltStack is so much easier for us to use and maintain.

Incentivized

• The product is extremely easy to deploy, extremely positive.
• If you take full advantage of this product as I did, you will maximize your ROI quickly as we did.
• We were able to visualize our vulnerabilities efficiently and effectively and maintain scheduled scans that allowed us to maintain a continuous improvement atmosphere while securing our investments.
• The ability provide reporting allows our IT department to prioritize issues and remediate as required without chasing down low risk issues over high risk issues that need immediate attention.

Incentivized

• We manage two complex highly available self-healing (all infrastructure and systems) environments using SaltStack. Only one person is needed to run SaltStack. That is a HUGE return on investment.
• Building tooling on top of SaltStack has allowed us to share administrative abilities by role - e.g. employee X can deploy software Y. No need to call a sysadmin and etc.
• Recovery from problems, or time to stand-up new systems is now counted in minutes (usually under eight) rather than hours. This is a strategic advantage for rolling out new services.

Incentivized