The most annoying problem was with adding IP addresses. You'd think this should be a simple task, but not so: To enter address ranges from multiple subnets, you must pull from a text file. If any address fails, the entire scan fails, but not necessarily right away. On several occasions we had to wait for half an hour before SAINT bombed on one address that we'd entered incorrectly. SAINT would benefit from a more intuitive interface for programming multiple addresses and address blocks.
Although SAINT doesn't offer much in the way of exportable reports, it does provide some well-designed prebuilt reports and lets you create your own. SAINT's reports make extensive use of hyperlinks--letting us jump from an address to an explanation of that entire system and so on; unfortunately, we soon found ourselves lost in the jumps. We believe that a dynamic reporting interface would prove much more efficient than simple hyperlinks. SAINT is a good solution for small-to-midsize organizations, but it doesn't have the aggregation capabilities needed for larger enterprises.
SAINT 4.3, 10 hosts: $639; Class C: $2,495; 500 hosts: $5,195; auditing licenses: $395 to $9,495, SAINT Corp., (800) 596-2006, (301) 656-0521. www.saintcorporation.com
nCircle's IP360 is an extremely low maintenance and highly distributed VA system. Scanning appliances pull jobs, updates and vulnerability signatures from a master control and aggregation server over a secure transport. Once the appliances have been assigned jobs, they run at routine intervals, sending results back to the aggregator for reporting. Although this push/pull method makes the IP360 unique and easy to maintain, it also is a hindrance: Once a job is assigned to a scanning appliance, it scans indefinitely until it's stopped manually. In fact, we couldn't find any way to issue a simple one-time scan. Even when we tried to stop the appliance through the management server, the scans continued to function, and we were forced to restart each of the appliances manually. However, we were able to reboot appliances from the management interface.
On the management side, the Web-based user interface is a bit cumbersome: It consists of a series of tabbed pages that continually populate downward. One simple tab selection can result in an additional two or three rows of items. At one point we were confronted with four rows of tabs. IP360 would benefit from a new GUI design.
Although the IP360 doesn't offer an abundance of reports, those it does offer are well-designed, can be sorted by IP address or vulnerability, and provide an excellent array of cross-referencing hyperlinks to take you from one area in the report to another.
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
