Small business AV solutions.

[gmaster456]

I'm looking for a server based antivirus solution that monitors the server and client PC's with a central management console on the server. Any suggestions?

 

[Nothinman]

I'm not a fan of any A/V, really. They all seem to only catch a small subset of what's out there, but sadly you can't just let them go without. We generally resell TrendMicro to our SMB clients.

 

[JBT]

I've used McAfee's ePO quite a bit. Its actually pretty good. I don't know how much it costs to license for a small business though.

 

[xSauronx]

I've used McAfee's ePO quite a bit. Its actually pretty good. I don't know how much it costs to license for a small business though.

i worked with mcafee at a hospital/medical group. the agents (4.7, 4.8 iirc) rendered a pc just about useless during a scan.

the console is decent though. i dealt with a lot of agent upgrade issues but if you read the docs they are not that hard to get a handle on.

where i work now we push symantec endpoing protection. the agents have less system impact when scanning, but the console is only ok and console version upgrades are just a disaster waiting to happen. I've lost count of the number of customers weve had in the last year with SEP manager problems (log files eating up HDD space on servers, issues pushing out and upgrading clients, AV updates not getting pushed out, etc, all of these often after a console upgrade)

support for symantec is good though, usually, and they have loads of documentation online for when their shit breaks

 

[pauldun170]

I've used McAfee's ePO quite a bit. Its actually pretty good. I don't know how much it costs to license for a small business though.

Everytime I see the word McAfee I look for a puppy or Kitten to kick.

We use it at work and it is horrendous garbage when paired with the corporate standard image.

I don't know how many times I've watched fcagte.exe bog down my laptop and kill hours worth of productivity.

 

[Nothinman]

Everytime I see the word McAfee I look for a puppy or Kitten to kick.

We use it at work and it is horrendous garbage when paired with the corporate standard image.

I don't know how many times I've watched fcagte.exe bog down my laptop and kill hours worth of productivity.

Yea, ePolicy Orchestrator seems like a good idea with a terrible implementation. At least the last time I saw it.

 

[Mushkins]

Yea, ePolicy Orchestrator seems like a good idea with a terrible implementation. At least the last time I saw it.

Throw one more hat in for ePO being a buggy, nightmarish mess.

The last company I worked for used McAfee ePO and it was broken garbage through and through. After my first week there I copied a bunch of known good files from my McAfee install onto my network share so I could overwrite them on the users PCs in minutes as the inevitable string of dozens of tickets about broken AV came in every single time ePO pushed a client update.

McAfee Software As A Service hasn't been bad though. We license and manage it through our SonicWalls. It still uses ePO in the background, but it's some sort of web-managed lite version that seems to break things way less. The downside being it's only available through certain security appliances which may be too expensive for a small business solution.

 

[nk215]

I use SEP version 12.1. Works fine so far.

 

[Shyatic]

SEP is okay. I like Forefront personally... and Trend Micro is also very good.

 

[JBT]

Everytime I see the word McAfee I look for a puppy or Kitten to kick.

We use it at work and it is horrendous garbage when paired with the corporate standard image.

I don't know how many times I've watched fcagte.exe bog down my laptop and kill hours worth of productivity.

fcagte.exe is for DLP which is not included with the standard AV suite.
I'm not saying McAfee has no issues, but we have very few issues with it except on terminal servers with 50 or so users logged in. As long as applications vendors are clear about what exceptions are needed for on access scanning. Its been great. If they have poor documentation and the files or directory has a high volume of use its going to be a poor experience for sure.

 

[pauldun170]

fcagte.exe is for DLP which is not included with the standard AV suite.
I'm not saying McAfee has no issues, but we have very few issues with it except on terminal servers with 50 or so users logged in. As long as applications vendors are clear about what exceptions are needed for on access scanning. Its been great. If they have poor documentation and the files or directory has a high volume of use its going to be a poor experience for sure.

Spend morning productive.
Go to lunch...
Come back and watch scan32.exe laughing at me in task manager.
Proceed to work in slow-mo and listen to cpu fan go on full blast
Right about that time where scan32 finishes
fcagte.exe pipes in.

Might as well just shut down the laptop right there.

This is on an Elitebook 8540w with an i7-620m

It may not just be McAfee but when my laptop chugs its McAfee process doing the chomping

 

[Chiefcrowe]

I like forefront myself but just started using it. How is the console?