GFI LanGuard: Step by step guide

GFI LanGuard is a leading network security scanner and patch management solution that acts as a virtual security consultant. It gives you a complete picture of your network setup, provides risk analysis and helps you maintain a secure and compliant network with minimal effort. So how does LanGuard work?

The first step is to scan the network to discover all your devices including mobile devices and search for security issues. Once discovered the devices can be managed either by performing remote agentless scans, or by deploying agents. To perform a remote agentless scan, you simply need to specify your target machines select the scanning profile that indicates what to look for, enter proper credentials and there you go.

GFI LanGuard will remotely detect your servers, workstations, laptops, mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, and even virtual machines, routers switches and printers. Using the dashboard to analyze the scan results, on the left you can see the computers on the network and the smartphones and tablets that connect to your Microsoft Exchange servers. The right hand side provides a network security overview. You can drill down to any security sensor to get more information about the particular issues shown you can also view all the vulnerabilities found on each machine.

You can see which patches are missing and this list includes patches for Microsoft products, Mac OS systems, major Linux distributions and popular third-party software such as Adobe, Java, Web browsers and more you can also see which ports are open and the processes using those ports. What software is installed, the status of critical security applications like anti virus, anti-spyware and firewalls devices and hardware installed all machines, and system information such as running services, shares, users, groups and more.

The remediate section allows you to take actions such as deploying or rolling back updates both security and non-security ones. Deploying custom software, scripts and uninstalling unauthorized applications. The dashboard can also be used to drill down and fix security issues. For example, here we see that this computer is vulnerable and needs further investigation, it has missing patches. Let's deploy this one, we are now taking to the Remediation center with the computer and specific patch pre-selected and ready for deployment you can see the progress here.

The reporting section allows you to run pre-configured or customized reports based on your exact requirements from an executive network security overview and full technical audit to dedicated reports for different compliance regulations such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, PSN, COCO and more. All reports can be exported to various popular formats or scheduled to run on a regular basis and be automatically emailed to selected recipients. Scan, analyze and remediate security issues with your very own virtual security consultant, GFI LanGuard.

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