Which AV solution for corporate environment?

[jstegmann]

Hello guys!

This is my first post in what seems to be a great forum - I hope I can nurish a bit on the accumulated wisdom here ;)

I'm about to select an AV solution for a corporate environment with app. 150 workstations, 15 file servers, 1 Exchange server and 1 ISA server. Needless to say my choice is highly influenced by the quality of the administration software.

I've installed test servers with Avast, NOD32, TrendMicro and KAV. If I were to choose only from the quality of the client I would go for NOD32, but unfortunately the admin software is not very impressive. Avast has some very nice admin stuff, but I'm a bit worried about the level of protection (we did get infected while running the test server)... ::)

KAV seems to offer a nice compromise with a good admin side and (judging from VB100 and various tests) a very good level of protection. But KAV seems to be getting a lot of critical remarks, and I haven't had that much experience with it my self, so...

OK - so much for my thought on the matter :-X

Please let me hear of any experience you guys might have in this area - I look forward to be getting a truckload of helpful advice :)

Cheers,

JS.

[Randy_Bell]

Hi JS,

First, welcome to Wilders and to the AV forum in particular!

I'm not sure what you mean by, "KAV seems to be getting a lot of critical remarks". I'm a NAV-user myself but so far as detection is concerned, KAV is the absolute tops in overall detection rate.

I have not seen a lot of negative comments unless you are thinking about the problems that KAV 5.0 Personal had with the data streams [ADS] issue. I am not familiar with Kaspersky's corporate edition, only the personal edition. I own and use KAV 3.5 and 4.5 as manual backups to NAV on two PCs.

I'm not sure if you would be interested but Symantec Corporate isn't too bad; their enterprise product line is quite mature, IMHO. But it looks like you have already ruled them out which, if that is the case, is fine; just ignore my suggestion.

Warmly, Ran

[vlk]

Hi jstegmann, you're saying that avast didn't stop an infection on of the test machines...? Pity that you didn't mention that on our forum (while discussing the ADNM features), we could've looked into the problem... :-\

Thanks :)
Vlk

[meneer]

We're running CA etrust AV as a centrally managed AV solution. Works great. Good detection and effective and efficient management. We had a problem running etrust as an Exchange mailscanner. On every signature update, all inboxes would be scanned. Depending on the size and number of boxes this could mean that the performance of exchange was impacted severely. But with 150 boxes, I don't think this is a problem.

Right now we use Antigen as a mailscanner and etrust as virusscanner on the exchange server (configured to not scan mailboxes).
Besides we run a Barracuda spamfirewall that catches all virusses in front of our exchange server, so mailvirusses are almost extinct, etrust on the workstations will catch those not caught by Barracuda.

[jstegmann]

Hi vlk,

I did actually mention it - only not on the forum. I send the infected files by e-mail some time prior to our discussion there. I'm not trashing Avast or anything - works great, but I don't know if it offers the same level of protection as e.g. KAV (I've looked at www.av-comparatives.org where Avast scores somewhat lover than e.g. NOD32 and KAV). But maybe ZOO viruses also play a big part of this score, so the comparatives might actually be misleading with respect to ITW protection... ???

But thumbs up to your admin sofware - it really sets the standard IMO :)

JS.