AnTi-Virus Software - which one?

[nsherin]

Hi all,

 

I'm shortly going to evaluating a new anti-virus solution. As there are so many products out there, I'm after some recommendations, if possible. The software needs to ogger the following:

 

- Cheap to license per PC

- No irritating serial numbers - like the AVG client software, which I need to go around every workstation and re-licence when it expires

- Central management console, where I can push out new difinitions

- Low footprint - we still have a fair number of PCs with 512MB RAM plus a number of PCs with Atom processors in them

- Able to run on Windows XP Professional and Windows Server 2003, with future proofing for Srver 2008 and Windows 7

 

Any help/advice/suggestions are much appreciated1

 

Cheers,

Neil

[Stuart_C]

Personally I'm running McAfee with EPO server. Central managment, pushes everything out, sync's with AD fine. Lots of control options and you can deploy the software via AD if you wish,

[bodminman]

BitDefender here. Moved from Symantec.

 

Really easy to setup and manage.

[RTFM]

We rolled out Vipre across site yesterday and it's a doddle. Their support is good, deep scanning doesnt seem to have an effect on the ability to use the machine (unlike Sophos which was so resource intensive when scanning it was ridiculous).....

 

All in all very impressed with Vipre

 

We run a mix of XP and Win 7 (32 and 64 bit) and it hasnt been a bit of bother throughout the testing and the rollout. It also comes with a handy plugin for uninstalling/removing your old AV.

[simpsonj]

Sophos will do what you want too. I don't particularly like it, but I don't particularly like any Ant-Virus...

[localzuk]

We use CA eTrust here. Very low resource demands, keeps up to date pretty much perfectly, keeps the machines clear of nasties etc...

 

Not sure on pricing though, as we get it free from our LA at the moment.

[SYNACK]

We use CA eTrust here. Very low resource demands, keeps up to date pretty much perfectly, keeps the machines clear of nasties etc...

 

Not sure on pricing though, as we get it free from our LA at the moment.

 

Which version are you running, we had all sorts of issues with v7 and 8 but the v8 stuff was their integrated AV, antimalware with the stupid client web interface for the scanner.

 

At the moment we are using the latest version of Norton Antivrus Corporate which although a little hungry actually does its job reasonably well and is massivly improved from the Nortons hell of old.

[speckytecky]

I find Sophos does the job well - specially as my LA pay for it.

 

Issues it had which at the time did harm it's rep and force memory upgrades, have been ironed out.

 

Support is UK based if you catch it daytime and in my opinion, superb.

[mac_shinobi]

NOD32 by eset ??

[localzuk]

Which version are you running, we had all sorts of issues with v7 and 8 but the v8 stuff was their integrated AV, antimalware with the stupid client web interface for the scanner.

 

At the moment we are using the latest version of Norton Antivrus Corporate which although a little hungry actually does its job reasonably well and is massivly improved from the Nortons hell of old.

 

We're running r8.1, with the web based interface as you say. We haven't had any issues here.

[SYNACK]

We're running r8.1, with the web based interface as you say. We haven't had any issues here.

 

Must have got better, we had 8.0 and on our older macines scheduled scans and stuff just choked them completely. That and the overhead of a web browser for a simple dialogue or form was nuts.

[Disease]

We use NOD32 here, used to use Symantec but Nod is much easier to use.

[AyatollahPies]

If you have machines with 512MB or less then Sophos will grind them to a halt.

 

It uses the best part of 100MB simply to sit in the background. MSE uses almost half of that even when doing full scans. Not that you can use MSE in an education environment.

[Theblacksheep]

Anyone using Forefront from school agreement?

[tom_newton]

Another vote for VIPRE here - we use it internally, and if you buy (or have bought) a Smoothwall product in the UK, you can get VIPRE desktop licences at a reduced rate It really is top stuff though. Nice and nippy, few FPs, good catch rate, and they're a nice bunch too are the Sunbelt lot (even their new masters @ GFI are ok!)

[mats]

Kaspersky here, replaced symantec. Usable but not always good at catching and cleaning up trojans - malwarebytes usually gets called in to do that.

[nsherin]

Thanks, guys for the suggestions thus far.

 

So far. it's looking like Vpra and NOD32 are the most recommended, along with eTrust - I also used Symantec some years back and it also seemed OK, so I might give it a try. McAfee concern me a bit, after an update they pushed out a while back that ended up trashing Windows installations.

 

I'll also contact our LEA - they may well have a solution that we can buy into at a decent price.

[Sylv3r]

Scrapped Symantec and went with Kaspersky.

 

If didn't get many negative comments in this thread but I have read others where people didn't rate Kaspersky. 3 months use here and no complaints - much prefer it to the previous symantec.

[tom_newton]

Scrapped Symantec and went with Kaspersky.

 

If didn't get many negative comments in this thread but I have read others where people didn't rate Kaspersky. 3 months use here and no complaints - much prefer it to the previous symantec.

 

When we used it we found it decent, but a little heavy. When we changed to VIPRE we also realised that Kaspersky's management tools weren't up to those standards. Not a bad old thing though.

[zag]

Anyone using Forefront from school agreement?

 

I just gave the recent 2010 forefront release a go but its typical bloatware designed for huge multi national corporations. I think I had to install system center 2007 and about a million patches just to get it up and running.

 

I wasn't impressed and simply gave up in the end.

 

I wish microsoft would make a management backend for security essentials, its brilliant and I really wouldn't mind paying for a way to manage it.

[2097]

The 50% educational discount pushed me towards Nod32 by eset direct

 

for 260 machines is was around £1500 per year ( also its cheaper if you do 3 years )

 

A lot faster and less resource hungry than mcafee and sophos .

 

There console was a bit of a pain to setup at first , but once working its perfect !.. and its 100% better than mcafee's

 

sophos's console is a little bit better

[skell]

We use Symantec Endpoint here. No problems at all.

[Theblacksheep]

I just gave the recent 2010 forefront release a go but its typical bloatware designed for huge multi national corporations. I think I had to install system center 2007 and about a million patches just to get it up and running.

 

I wasn't impressed and simply gave up in the end.

 

I wish microsoft would make a management backend for security essentials, its brilliant and I really wouldn't mind paying for a way to manage it.

 

We currently use SCCM here anyway, but Symantec EPP, which is good but very expensive for 1000 computers!

 

Was you unimpressed because of the pre-reqs and other stuff needed? or the performance/quality of AV?

[Dave84]

Another vote for NOD32. We moved away from Sophos last year as I got sick of it, a pain to deploy on Windows 7 (unless they have improved it) and is a complete resource hog. NOD32 however is nice and light which is very handy for the slower computers.

[Earthling]

Moved from LEA supplied Mcaffee to Avast last July......centrally managed, pushes out updates, deploys from the management console, discovers new machines from AD, Exchange server version available.....revealed shedloads of trojans, malwares etc that Mcaffee didn't pick up at all. Licensed from the server, updates from the server unless it can't be contacted (teacher's laptops during holidays etc) then it updates from the internet. Very pleased with it indeed, doesn't seem to slow the machines down at all.

 

Speak to Stan at avast! Contacts if you can, really helpful guy.