Anti-V - What do you use

[john]

Ok, My Sophos Licence is up for renewal in the next 60 days or so, and it was agreed today that we would evaluate some alternatives rather than either saying "Yes please Sophos, another few years of potentital hell" or "No thanks, see you in hell".

I would be very interested in seeing what others use, and your views, both good and bad on them. One thing that is key for us is 90% of our servers are dual carded for 2 seperate LANs (Admin & Academic) so the anti-virus must be able to talk over one or the other, and be able to manage, unlike Sophos originally which got really confused with 2 cards.

Also XP Home must be a supported OS for it, unlike Sophos where it is not supported (they do try to help you, but they don't officially support it). Cost is not the number 1 thing on my mind, as we can juggle / haggle etc when we get to that point, so don't think I may not be interested as its more than Sophos, as Sophos has gone very expensive compaired to its original prices - used to be around £150 for entire site (about 250 machines, inc 25 servers) now its up to around £2000 for the same!


So far on my list to look at is:
Symantec Anti-Virus
Trend Micro Anti-Virus
AVG
Avast
Panda

[webman]

All of the schools in our LEA (Durham) have a subscription to Symantec Corporate (completely different to the retail Norton stuff, please don't judge it by those standards... 8)) and I can say that it's great, it does the job

[john]

Thanks for that Craig, I must admit, I fancy a good look at Sav corporate, anybody near to my area who uses it? I feel it may be slim in North Yorks / Lancs border as NYCC uses Sophos, and I think I heard that Lancs use Sophos, but Dos_box will no doubt confirm or tell me I am wrong.

I have requested an evaluation kit from Symantec, but its always good to talk to people and potentially visit them, as well as using this excellent resource.

I don't mind Norton Anti-V for home use. Especially when I got a free copy from Symantec, with a 13 month sub, so I am not going to argue.

[ChrisH]

Lancs use Sophos :?

[webman]

I'm not a sales person, but Symantec Corporate's administration interface is an MMC snap-in, features remote client installation (via RPC I think), clients receive definitions from local server and has very little overhead.

[john]

Sounds nice then Craig, I will ring Symantec on Monday then and give them a good proding

[Norphy]

We use McAfee which is provided to us FOC by our LEA. Like Symantec, it's centrally administered from a central inferface, again an MMC snapin. The nice thing about EPO (the central administration console) is that it can manage all of McAfee's corperate products like Groupshield, spamkiller and others. It can also handle updates for other antivirus products too from I can gather.

[russdev]

so what is Sophos like as we currently run rm vp which is symantec corporate rebranded but at very cheap rate problem is can only license cc workstations with that price and we have to buy in for laptops at standard price..

which leads us to having seperate virus contracts and means already got it split into 3...

so we are looking at alt which company have suggested sophos (waiting to see if can lower price)

so whats software like assume it dfoes central managment etc like symantec...

russ

[john]

I am not keen on Sophos, due to many problems (mostly commented on this board) so am keen to move away. When its working its brill, but when its not working well, its a nightmare and can let viruses in and kill your system, which is not good. I would be keen to try and use Symantec. But am open to ideas and others thoughts so I get the best product for the job as its alright my testing, but whats support like, usefrienldyness etc....

[everton4europe]

Trend i have never run into problems with. the new version also scans for gaps in updates on the windows os. With teh server side you have one machine with the main program on and this distr4obutes out. it also removes any old versions/other companies av then installs there own. but with the server with the main program on it uses 2 licences. Also they offer substatial education discounts. The company i deal with is Network Defence on my licencing. Also they will cover multi sites on one licence

[john]

Thanks for that info, keep it coming!

[Andrew_C]

F-Secure. Not my side of the system, so I have no knowlege of why we use it, or if it does whatever it does, well. However, so far, it hasn't just sat there and let all sorts of nastyness happen. Thanks Sophos! :-(

[deanc]

currently sophos until the subscription runs out later this year. never had any problems with it but i think the current plans are to go with McAffe as we apparently have a site licence from our LEA (Northants) for the admin network that we can use on curriculum, we use McAffe on admin but tend to leave it alone so i dont really know how good/bad it is

[openhgs]

On 95% of our machines we use Linux, which is by far the best A/V solution. On the admin machines we run Sophos, basically 'cus the LEA won't let us connect to their grid unless we DO run Sophos. Sophos is not my favourite A/V solution for machines running M$ operating systems. Sophos does not trap all known virus's; a specific example is msbb-a. To quote from the Sophos web site "Following customer feedback Sophos has disabled detection of this application, which is not a virus." There is plenty of references which state that msbb is a well known security risk. It is spyware, written by 180solutions.com. One could surmise that the customer who provided this feedback was 180solutions, or am I just being cynical?

[broc]

Symantec Corporate (same LEA as Craig). Server contacts Symantec daily, downloads any updates & deploys to clients automatically. You can push the client code out to any workstation on domain (haven't tried XP Home) from MMC & interrogate clients regarding status & history.