Virtual scanners for consultants, enterprises and the cloud
Qualys announced virtual scanner appliances for its QualysGuard Cloud Platform and suite of integrated applications for security and compliance.
The new software-based virtual scanner appliance has already been formally qualified to run on many of the most common virtualization and cloud platforms including VMware and Amazon EC2.
These virtualized scanners supplement the current hardware-based QualysGuard Scanner Appliance that is currently in use by thousands of organizations worldwide – with over 9,500 appliances in 85 countries. Like with the hardware-based scanners, customers can manage the virtual scanners from their QualysGuard accounts via a secure web interface, where all gathered scan data will be available for reporting and remediation.
The QualysGuard Virtual Scanner Appliance is available immediately to support a variety of computing environments and use cases, including:
- Consultant use. Well-suited for the consultant who will scan a variety of customer environments during limited engagements. Consultants can deploy the scanner directly into customers’ virtual infrastructures; or install the scanner on their own laptops running VMware Workstation/Fusion/Player or Oracle VirtualBox. A QualysGuard Virtual Scanner Appliance license is bundled as part of the standard QualysGuard Consultant seat license.
- Enterprise and IaaS deployments. The virtual scanner can be deployed into enterprise and hosted IaaS environments for ongoing use. A specific VMware vApp distribution is available for advanced VMware vSphere data centers, providing automated deployment and configuration through VMware vCenter Server.
- Amazon Machine Image (AMI) distribution for deployment in Amazon EC2 and Amazon VPC. An Amazon AMI distribution of the QualysGuard Virtual Scanner Appliance sits ready to be quickly instantiated into Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) through Amazon’s management console. Amazon VPC subnets, in particular, are well-served by the deployment of a VPC-based virtual scanner.
“With the virtualization of our scanner appliances, we bring the full power of the cloud to consultants’ laptops. Also, enterprises can now easily deploy scanners in both data centers and branch offices or highly segmented networks at a much reduced cost,” said Philippe Courtot, chairman and CEO of Qualys.