12

What enterprise virus-scanning systems do you recommend?

Jon Galloway
  • 1,506
  • 1
  • 17
  • 20
  • Would also love some FREE solutions, if applicable, to any answers forthcoming. – Pure.Krome Apr 30 '09 at 08:01
  • Free AV solutions can't be good by by definition IMHO - you can't update virus/malware database when you have free time... it requires constant updates. – blank3 Jan 11 '10 at 20:59
  • @blank3, wrong...MS Security Essentials is free and very good. MS Forefront is the purchased version of S.E. Big difference is that Forefront can be managed across a network. Otherwise, they work off the same definitions databases. – IAbstract Jun 19 '10 at 23:32
  • @blank3, I strongly disagree with your opinion. I also assume you meant free as in price, not "Free" as in Freedom. If you were talking price, there are many solid and no-cost AV software. However, the situation does change when you are talking enterprise. As far as i know, all AV companies charge when it comes to enterprise. You could still use the Free (as in Freedom) ClamAV. Although due to scanning speed and lack of full featured Windows support, I might consider other options first. – J. M. Becker Sep 09 '11 at 14:54

9 Answers9

15

We use NOD32. The main reason for choosing it was because it was less of a resource-hog than the others.

Edmund Tay
  • 592
  • 5
  • 10
5

We use McAfee and I would warn you from using it. It is veeeery slow. Previously we had AVG and it was much faster.

Edit: Oh, and it has deleted my 'bluescreen' screensaver from sysinternals. One day it popped up the window saying a virus with category 'joke' will be deleted. No options to ignore and keep it...

ya23
  • 501
  • 1
  • 5
  • 9
  • 1
    +1 definitely agree to NOT use McAfee. It's slow and does stupid things that don't help. – Robert MacLean Apr 30 '09 at 08:58
  • Agree re not to use McAfee...just had use Unlocker to release not one, but two locks McAfee had on a file and was preventing users from opening/saving the file –  May 01 '09 at 17:47
  • Chalk up another recommendation for NOT using McAfee. Especially the latest 8.7 version which has caused no end of issues on our network. We've rolled back to 8.5, but even that has been a major hassle. – CapBBeard May 04 '09 at 22:14
  • No one at McAfee has a sense of humor. – music2myear Dec 13 '11 at 21:22
4

In the past I have used Symantec Corporate Edition quite extensively. Whilst their Norton products have a bad rap (for good reason) for being slow, the corporate version was pretty quick and unobtrusive and had a good managment console. However that was a few years ago so they could have ruined it by now.

I've recently had to use kaspersky and I don't recommend it from what I saw. It may have been the version I was given but the centralised management features were a bit of a joke.

Sam Cogan
  • 38,736
  • 6
  • 78
  • 114
  • Got to agree with this one, although my opinion is based on the version that was out about 8 years ago! – Glenn Slaven Apr 30 '09 at 08:03
  • In my previous job we had Symantec Corporate and it indeed was a resource hog. – macbirdie Apr 30 '09 at 08:06
  • 1
    In my experience, Symantec puts too large a foot-print in terms of resource usage on the end-user desktops to make it a viable option. I've also found that it's not actually that great at picking up threats: on more than one occasion I've had to clean an infected PC that had Symantec installed, up to date and claiming the pc was just fine. – Ian Apr 30 '09 at 08:10
  • +1 for "had to use kaspersky and I don't recommend it". A recent company-wide install of Kaspersky caused massive performance issues (yet unresolved) – scunliffe Jun 10 '10 at 17:01
3

I can say one that it's not: CA eTrust. It's a pure resource vampire and never convinced me at its effectiveness.

Nelson Reis
  • 149
  • 3
  • 10
1

We have stopped recommending strict anti-virus software, and have moved to anti-malware at this point. Centrally controlled/distributed is a must. I agree with some of the people here that McAfee and Symantec have just gotten out of control with their bloatware. We have found a lot of success with F-Secure. It has a nice interface, not too heavy, the centralized management is pretty good. It covers viruses, spyware, internet usage, email, etc. Their support has been good so far and deployment has been pretty straightforward. We have it setup on a few networks. Since you are going to need something that works for your environment, I suggest you setup some virtual environments and test each of your candidates out, especially on the user experience side, I would guess you want the least intrusive software to minimize desktop support questions. Good luck!

John Virgolino
  • 687
  • 8
  • 17
1

avast! Professional Edition has some nice features like creating a preconfigured installation, background scanning (doesn't hog the hard drive while the computer is under load) and can be configured to be user-friendly in not dropping millions of notifications on him. There are some server products avast! authors offer, like avast! Distributed Network Manager.

At my side IT job I only used the client Professional Edition, without the management server or DNM and it worked very well.

macbirdie
  • 581
  • 3
  • 8
0

AVG professional. In my experience AVG does a good job is keeping their definitions up to date and does a thorough job.

One of the features i quite like about the site editions is the push functionality, it works quite well as long as there isn't a firewall in its way and easy to keep organized.

Shard
  • 1,432
  • 4
  • 21
  • 35
0

We use the kaspersky corporate anti-virus suite and love it!

Martin
  • 572
  • 4
  • 14
  • 26
  • How do you find the performance of this app? we installed it recently and noticed massive performance loss, and windows running out of memory and crashing. – scunliffe May 31 '10 at 21:41
0

I always use Malwarebytes for spot removal since it just seems to remove what Symantec often can't - has anyone tried the pro version? The site doesn't list any centralized management features...

Brad
  • 141
  • 1
  • 3