Network Vulnerability Scanners

What should you look for in a Vulnerability Scanner for your business?  What factors will influence your decision?  What capabilities should you look for?  An article by Cristian Florian of GFI LANguard in Help Net Security provides some answers to those questions, but also points out that knowledge of the IT staff is an additional critical requirement, as he states “It might sound easy: you find as many vulnerabilities as possible using vulnerability scanners and you fix them. In reality you will find vulnerabilities that specialized tools won’t because they do not have the big picture of your network. And you will often encounter security issues that cannot be fixed because that would prevent some business critical software from functioning properly.”  He speaks as well to the state of the network vulnerability product market’s spread, as the top 15 vendors only have about 50% market share, which indicates network security workers will have lots of choices, but lots of work to decide on the best product for their network.