Inside information - QualysGuard service strengthened with an intranet scanner appliance.(QUALYSGUARD Intranet Scanner Applicance )(Hardware Review)(Product/Service Evaluation)

TO CALL THE QUALYSGUARD Intranet Scanner Applicance just an appliance is to miss the point. Yes, it does include a device that's intended to scan behind the firewall, but it also comes with the QualysGuard Web- based service. The combined duo can provide complete, detailed vulnerability-assessment scanning inside and outside your firewall, and full reports on the Qualys Web site. As a result, you can view the results of your scans from any computer with Web access.

As you'd expect, Qualys offers the intranet appliance so it can work inside your corporate firewall. Although Qualys' earlier products worked well at scanning Internet-accessible computers, there's just not a lot they could do to get past a properly configured firewall. Now, the newly released appliance handles the internal task and reports its findings to the QualysGuard Web site, where that information is combined with information from any scans that have been ordered for outward-looking servers and devices.

Thanks to its vulnerability-scanning roots, QualysGuard can handle just about any operating system more recent than TRS-DOS (which has a …