| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer Security, Vulnerability Management, Vulnerability assessment |
| Founded | Columbia, Maryland, USA 2002 |
| Founder(s) | Ron Gula, Jack Huffard and Renaud Deraison |
| Headquarters | Columbia, Maryland, U.S.A. |
| Key people | Marcus Ranum, Ron Gula, Renaud Deraison, Jack Huffard |
| Products | Nessus, SecurityCenter, LCE, PVS |
| Website | http://www.tenable.com/ |
Tenable Network Security is a company specializing in enterprise-class software and hardware products for gathering, evaluating, communicating and reporting IT security and compliance information. The company, established in 2002, is privately owned and headquartered in Columbia, Maryland. The company is rapidly growing and according to the 2010 Inc. 5000, registered 3-year growth of 213% between 2007 and 2010.[1]
Noteworthy about Tenable Network Security is the number of innovators under one roof - company's technical leads have all created industry-significant products individually; Nessus (Renaud Deraison), Dragon IDS (Ron Gula), Gauntlet Firewall (Marcus Ranum contributed significantly), TIS firewall tool kit (Marcus Ranum contributed significantly) prior to joining forces at Tenable.
Tenable was known primarily for its Nessus vulnerability scanner, however, in the past few years it expanded its portfolio to four fully integrated software applications and launched Nessus Perimeter Service - a SaaS solution for on-demand network scanning. The products are agentless solutions architected for the continuous monitoring of vulnerabilities, configurations, data leakage, log analysis and compromise detection. The enterprise-level SecurityCenter, which is becoming a flagship product that drives company's growth, unifies real-time vulnerability, event and compliance monitoring into a single, role-based interface that facilitates evaluation, communication and reporting of information for effective systems management and decision making. The products are very technical in nature and require training for the user to utilize their full potential. Tenable Network Security's products are certified by the Center for Internet security (CIS)[2]. Tenable offers both training and certification programs for its products[3].
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Although the Nessus product has following in the industry, there's still misconception about the differences between the Nessus HomeFeed and the Nessus ProfessionalFeed available on Tenable's website. The company limits the free version (HomeFeed) of Nessus is to scanning only 16 IP addresses, it does not provide access to VM (Virtual Machine) appliance, the full set of plugins or email customer support. The Nessus ProfessionalFeed is the complete version and allows for email product support. The reasons that led to changing Nessus from GPL to proprietary licensing and ownership by Tenable are concisely explained by Dana Blankenhorn in his post "Nessus creator challenging the community"[4] on ZDNet from October 8, 2005.