Breaking News

Protect Your Network with GFI LANguard

Protect Your Network with GFI LANguard Securing a network isn’t fun but if you fail to do it, the outcome could be disastrous. For small and midsized enterprises, the challenges can be really significant because you have a relatively large number of machines to monitor and you don’t have the lavish budget of large companies. Still, there are many affordable tools you can use to protect your network and 

GFI LANguard is one of your best choices.

 GFI LANguard includes all the features you will need in order to keep your network in good shape. It also includes some unique features you won’t find in other similar products – for instance patch management is a really advanced feature and GFI LANguard is the only solution on the market, which can patch all major web browsers automatically.

 Perform a Network Audit – Scan, Analyze, and Remediate Your Network

GFI LANguard is a complete solution for your network. With it, you can quickly perform a network audit – i.e. scan, analyze, and remediate your network. The screenshot below gives you an idea of what you can do with GFI LANguard:

Basically, you can scan for security vulnerabilities, missing patches, service packs, etc. The scanning procedure is very flexible and you can select precisely what you want to scan. The Quick Scan and the Full Scan options use predetermined settings and if you want to scan specific areas, use the custom scans. Additionally, you can schedule scans in advance – for instance to run them at night, when your network is (presumably) not under such a heavy load as during the daytime. All this gives a lot of flexibility to a network administrator and makes his or her life easier. 

There are many scanning options you can set and if you decide to use the scanning profiles (shown in the screenshot below) you can set the scanning function exactly to your liking.

The analysis tools in GFI LANguard are also very impressive and they show you tons of useful information. There are various reports (they are a separate module) where you see in a graphic form what is going on in your network. Additionally, you can also use GFI LANguard to analyze results from external scans – just load them in the application in a format it supports and they will be analyzed. Fixing the errors found during scanning is also part of the software but it is locked in the trial version, so if you want to use it, you need a full license. 

Configuration Settings and Utilities 

The configuration options and utility settings in GFI LANguard deserve special attention because they help you to unleash the power of the application. In addition to the above mentioned scanning profiles there are tons of other options to configure different aspects of GFI LANguard. The configuration options are shown in the screenshot below:

As you see, you can configure almost any aspect of the application. Unfortunately, many of the interesting configuration options are disabled in the trial version, so unless you purchase a license, you won’t be able to see them in action.

The utilities included in GFI LANguard also deserve attention because they make network administration much easier. There are some standard utilities, such as DNS Lookup, Traceroute, or Whois but there are also more advanced ones, for instance computers and users enumeration, SNMP Audit, SNMP Walk, and SQL Server Audit. You can get an idea about the list of utilities from the screenshot below: 

All in all, my impressions from GFI LANguard are more than positive. It is an application with many features but still it looks very intuitive and easy to use. The documentation looks complete and very useful, so even if you can’t figure out right away how to perform a given task, a look at the docs is enough to get the idea.

No comments

//