Free, web-administered "Avast for Business".

Totally agree @Mayahana on all points that you have posted here & @ Avast forums. From my perspective the product is still in its beta stages bearing in mind the issues that are present & to date have not been resolved. Who ever made the decision to publish / advertise this as a final release application should maybe think again as it could do more harm than good in promoting IMO an excellent concept.

Unfortunately the beta testing team have left a lot to be desired as there is no way ATM I would subscribe to the premium services, where I presume the Avast Cloud Business revenue is going to be driven from.

@Mayahana do you also experience that when you click on Contact Avast Support in main the web portal management panel you get looped back to your account page? Where does one go to report errors? Once again who ever signed this off from beta to final should maybe reconsider pulling it back?

I along with I would guess many other fellow IT compatriots, will not even think about placing the endpoint or server packages into a live commercial / corporate SMB environment until the current problems are fixed.

In the 1.5 weeks of our evaluation, the web portal management features have remained the same along with the Endpoint program version 2015.10.0.2503.

On a positive note along with the plus points that I have previously mentioned in prior posts, Avast Business plays well in Outlook catching all fake nasty’s @ the endpoint that I have pushed through from our Exchange & Kerio Connect Mail servers.

Our testing will continue as there are many features of Avast Business Cloud that really “float my boat” & I look forward to endpoint management / stability bugs being resolved in the near future.

 

@Mayahana and @MikeMT you've highlighted a real problem that needs to be fixed and promptly, thank you. It's now been identified and will be corrected in the next update which will occur in the next 5-7 business days at the latest.

While I agree with your sentiment below MikeMT, throughout my time spent working in this world on various levels from IT deployment to internal work on building a solution like this, these issues come up more often in brand new products regardless. I'm sure you'll agree. Conversely they occur in mature products as well. To me, especially in my IT days, what mattered most was how quickly I could have a problem acknowledged as real (no tech support bs..) and how quickly it was addressed. I hope you guys believe we've done a good job in this area, on this incident, when you see the fix roll through.

Thanks again for the feedback and please keep it coming (positive negative critical we want it all!)

 

Luke many thanks for the prompt response & update

I fully understand that it is impossible with a new product like this to get things 100% right first time round.

I mentioned today in the Avast forums that by no way would I expect your new cloud concept to compete against Enterprise level products in endpoint support / management & security features. But I do believe your new package can successfully provide a high level of endpoint protection solution to many SMB environments & gain you a greater market share in that area. From my side of the fence the free features offerings are excellent!!


I look forward to evaluating the forthcoming stability & product enhancement updates in the near future & wish your team all the best with your new venture.

Regards

Mike

 

Is anyone else getting an 'Avast reputation services' popup while downloading Windows updates?

10-2-2015 20:28:07 FileRep: http://au.v4.download.windowsupdate..._a4dc652001ee45f5a03466fe6f3403d272d5fd38.exe
[Downloaded by: C:\Windows\System32\svchost.exe]
has a poor reputation.
--> Result: Ignoring.
10-2-2015 20:29:12 FileRep: http://au.v4.download.windowsupdate..._1a5d93dddbc431ab27b1da711cd3370891542797.exe
[Downloaded by: C:\Windows\System32\svchost.exe]
has a poor reputation.
--> Result: Ignoring.

 

Hi @remco8264

For the Win 8.1 workstations that we are using for testing Avast Business Security, the latest patch Tuesday MS updates for OS & Office downloaded, installed & ran today without any popups.

 

Same here Mike. Now testing Avast Business on 9 machines. SO far no issue other than my complaints about it's implementation, and the memory leak.

 

Hi @Mayahana, I got a positive response from Luke Walling in the Avast forum today.

---------

You've highlighted a real problem that needs to be fixed and promptly, thank you. It's now been identified and will be corrected in the next update which will occur in the next 5-7 business days at the latest.

Also on the point about Avast for Business being designed to compete against or replace an Enterprise product: Our target is the small business, and we're building to that feature set wise. That does not mean we can't scale to Enterprise device counts (in fact, we can). In some environments that look and feel like SMB but are more inline with the size of an Enterprise environment, our future feature set is likely to fit, like K-12 Education for instance.

Now, I think you may be referencing quality more here than what I've touched on. Regardless of our user target, quality is key, we won't be less than Enterprise grade in quality just because of our SMB user target. The product is currently just a few weeks out of the gate and you've found a real issue, together with issues that are known which are more feature improvements in our roadmap (like the inability to control PUP detections in policy that you and Mayahana have cited). These will be fixed, in short order.

Thanks for trusting Avast.

---------

Without setting expectations too high, as long as the Avast team develop their product as planned it could successfully fill a niche in the SMB endpoint security market place.

I currently have 4 boxes running AB & all being equal with the proposed updates I will also test on two new MS file servers that I have in the equation to set up in a few weeks.

Apart from the niggles that we have both been getting I’m well impressed, as so far the AB modules along with Hardened Mode aggressive enabled have quarantined all malware we have thrown @ it from web, mail & network. Similar to you I also have other preventative measures protecting my sites gateways, networks & endpoints too.

At the end of the day time will tell. But if all goes to plan hopefully AB will not only provide excellent security layers but also assist us in reducing costs / time on the SMB endpoint security management platform.

 

Thanks again for your trust, and for your input. We've spent a great deal of time discussing the feedback here, together with other user feedback this week.

In many cases this thread has helped validate what we already knew about features and functions that would be desirable and in fact were already in the pipe for future release. Conversely it has helped us think more closely about smaller details inside of those requirements such as enabling users to configure PUP detections more rapidly (believe it or not, its already in our backend, just not in our UI -- hence the settings reset to template default from the cloud). On the memory leak issue, you've cited a problem that would have caused more issues for other users that we hadn't yet noticed - improving quality for everyone.

In particular over the next few weeks we'll look closer at the 'hardened mode' functionality thats been discussed here, which today isn't heavily configurable outside of the local agent, and explore how we can make it more useful for your applications - the SMB application.

We'll be looking for your input on those thoughts .

 

Mayahana, I'm looking into the Intelligent Stream Scan issue. What OS is this? It actually seems that this setting is only applied in older versions of Windows (XP and Vista). Would that be your case?

Thanks,
Vlk

 

Windows 8.1x on all machines.

 

I'm going to have to drop this if the memory leak isn't fixed really soon. Some boxes are sitting at 500-900Mb of ram usage after being on most of the day! Not cool.

 

I will wait to see what the new update features that are supposedly arriving in the next few days provide & resolve. All being well I will install it onto one of our live networks. But if a satisfactory result is not forthcoming we will continue with our current tried & tested products.

Even for a SMB correctly evaluating, customising & implementing a “New Kid on the Block” security solution can take up a lot of time & effort. My feelings are that the ABS beta testing platform could have been a structured a whole lot better as this version should have never hit the final release scene. No matter what features are turned off the memory leak still exists.

Another factor I found strange was that if the virtualisation option was enabled in the MB BIOS, The ABS install footprint would grow by another 4GB!!! & I found no way of uninstalling / disabling the Avast VM application. The only solution was to uninstall the whole product, disable the BIOS VM option & start again from scratch.

Hopefully there will be a reasonable configuration guide arriving too.

 

@MikeMT and Mayahana, the memory leak issue is fixed and in testing as of Friday with our QA group. It should be in your hands this week. Apologies again on this.

I'm capturing the feedback here on the virtualization option mentioned also to be sure we don't have another issue to look at there.

Noted: on the beta feedback. We are always working to improve what we do, and we will do so on the next releases major or minor.

Thanks

 

Cheers for the heads up on the progress report Luke.

I will keep up the faith with ABS as I would much prefer to continue with our Avast Endpoint deployment plan than put it on ice.

All the best

Mike

 

Good to hear.. I hope all of this gets sorted sooner rather than later.

Kaspersky killed their hosted offerings, which is a shame. So the playing field is rather light right now, and I feel Avast could corner the market if they improve it enough!

 

Any word on patch? Found almost a 1000Mb spike on one machine. I may have to pull this soon if it's not fixed and pushed out.

 

Hi All,

We have released the verified memory leak fix to the public this morning CET. It is available to all customers and will get pushed automatically to all endpoints if automatic software updates are on on these endpoints. You can also manually update to insure that the update is delivered immediately.

Thanks for your patience on this.

 

Great to hear thank you.

Also could you post a change log on the avast forums? Like what's changed in either program or the portal.

 

Thank you!

/E

 

Pleased to report back that the 2 workstations that I have been running this morning for the past 4 hours ABCC service memory footprint remains stable @ 1.8 - 2 Mb.

The total memory services now consumed by Avast Business Security Endpoint protection approx 25Mb.. Well nice!!

I look forward to the up & coming updates that are on the horizon.

Cheers & well done to the Avast team.

Mike

 

Thanks for the update

It would be nice if I could see in the web console which version is installed on an endpoint. Then I could see if all devices have updated correctly (without checking each one manually).

 

I can confirm (3 installs) that the memory footprint seems stable so far, great job!
Maybe I missed it, but can you make the "Scan for PUP" stick if you edit or make a new template in the console?

/E

 

Update not recognized, even with manual pushes it didn't push a new version..

Also, no way to 'force' Scan for PUP's on.. This is a major issue for me in that the settings are 'reset' back to default with each system boot. I don't feel it is ready for primetime be cause of that. (IMO)

 

Mayahana, open up the local UI for me. I have a theory on this.

Does it still say "Avast for Business Beta"?

If so could I ask you to remove the device in the cloud console and reinstall? We had an early issue preventing a build of our beta client from updating properly.

We are working on the PUP and settings issues highlighted in general--I'll have a timeline on that shortly.

Thanks

 

I've never run the beta. So that's probably not it.

Thanks