It used to be a simple affair. AV software came in a few different guises and we all chose our own brand and most of them were ok products. Jump forward to 2007 and the issue is much more complex.

We used to be solid Norton supporters. It was all we offered for sale. We’d work with whatever the customer chose to use, but we always recommended Norton AV. ( never the suite… bulky and redundent and kills performance) A couple of years ago Symantecs products started to be harder to use. Installs were more problematic and reinstalls become more and more frequent. The occurance of people using Norton that had tried to update, and failed, jumped dramatically. We stopped reselling it last year.

Mcafee is worse. Bloated code and convoluted porcesses make it hard to use, let alone the performance hit.

A recent independent study found that mcafee was near the bottom of the stack. Link to report here.

What do you use, recommend and resell to your clients?

Why do you think there is no peer review process of the AV software industry?

I have been using the Avast system for a while now and it seems to work really well.  it is sharware for personal use, but able to be resold to your customers.  They update it regularly, and it is open source… very cool stuff.

Depending on the type of business and its size, there are only two products I actually recommend:

Enterprise Business: McAfee Enterprise v8.x Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware
Small & Medium Business: Kaspersky Business Security
Residential/SoHo Business: Kaspersky Internet Security

Some people actually downgrade McAfee and I agree—its not the best for residential and SMB environments. It too ‘embedded’ with background crap and takes up alot of application memory. Sort of reminds me of Norton AV (both enterprise and residential versions). Why in the world would you install a program that has to install 4 other pieces just to run. When it comes to anti-virus, you should just need to install one program—not one w/ modules for registring, updating, services, etc.

In defense for McAfee, McAfee Enterprise Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware is actually light on its feet and extremely fast for detecting and removing issues. In fact, SonicWall internet appliances actually have McAfee ePO built in and won’t allow internal PCs to access the outside world w/o having an updated DAT file available.

For SMB and residential/SoHo, Kaspersky is a winner hands down. After attending a CMP Exchange conference last year, the Kaspersky team gave us a challenge. Run their ‘trial’ software against any PC we had other anti-virus/anti-spyware software on and they will bet it finds something their compeditors didn’t detect. I won’t say what I was using (AVG ), but Kaspersky’s little program found 4 viruses and 7 pieces of spyware that Spybot and AdAware didn’t even detect. Even though it has a subscription plan, not many vendors can actually say their software updates hourly and have a proven track record against other makers and how fast their response time is. In fact, they even have modules available for mobile users, file server, Microsoft exchange servers and Linux servers.

I can say, however, that after testing Trend Micro—I won’t ever touch that program again. Installing and configuring it is a breeze, but removing it from a Microsoft Server 2003 environment ended up to nearly making me have to format the machine and start over from scratch. Their ‘uninstall’ simple just doesn’t work and you will spend hours having to make registry key edits to remove their embedded services and hidden directory paths.

Currently I am testing eEye’s Blink Personal Edition with Anti-virus. Small in size, but god this thing has alot of personality, extremely robust and is very easy to configure. Oh, did I forget to mention that its actually a free download w/ a one year subscription (limited time offer). They have a Professional version that adds on additional modules (i.e. Policy-based registry, application, and process execution protection; Policy-based control over USB and other removable storage devices; Local vulnerability assessment)

-- M

Hey, thanks for the heads up!  I will check out Kaspersky…

I don’t know how newbie had a bad experience with Trend Micro.  I’ve been using their Client Server Messaging for SMB on all my Small Business Server installs for over five years and have never had an issue with it.  I always do complete uninstalls of the product when I upgrade because it is so easy to remove and install.  Going from version 3.0 to 3.5 of the CSM for SMB didn’t even require a reboot.  Version 3.5 includes anti-spyware and a new proprietary anti-spam engine that scans the new graphic-based spam with an OCR-type engine.  The new integrated console is a breeze to use.  When I was watching my clients before the Daylight Savings Time weekend, I could even tell which PCs they hadn’t updated to SP2 with the console.

Trend has been around since the ‘80’s.  They used to provide the BIOS-based anti-virus on the old DOS PCs and it seems to be all they are focused on.  They recently purchased HiJack this, which leads me to believe they are focused, because who can get around some of the horrendous spam problems on already-infected PC’s without that program.  Their patterns are updated almost daily and sometimes more than once a day.  I’ve only seen one issue with the SMB product about two years ago where it sent the server CPU to 100% after a pattern update, but they corrected it within hours and if you had your server set to update “hourly”, which I always do, it more than likely fixed the problem before the system was affected.  I think it took Norton a little longer to fix the problem that identified Microsoft Office as a threat and removed it.

I tried Norton AV and McAffee as well.  Norton in the Netware environment always used to misreport the status of the client PCs and on Windows clients, especially the one’s Dell shipped with Norton Internet Security, that was all but impossible to remove.  The most downloaded documents and files on the Symantec website were the ones to uninstall the product.  That has to tell you something.  (One of the early benefits I found with the Trend Micro OfficeScan client was that if you installed it on a PC with NAV or McAfee installed that you had trouble removing using their uninstallers, the TM Installer would remove it for you without any issue.

I have to rate them the best.

I recently came across a new anti-everything application from eEye Digital Security called Blink Personal Edition. Blink Personal Internet security with Antivirus is the first Internet security solution to build all of the necessary protection layers into a small package that breaks the ‘bloatware’ mold of other Internet security products.

Unlike some of the endpoint security suites other vendors provide where the end result is a set of disparate products pieced together through acquisition, Blink was designed and built to provide a superior level of protection with improved system performance by truly integrating the necessary security technologies into a single endpoint security solution:

* Anti-virus technology
* Anti-spyware technology
* Anti-phishing and identity theft protection
* Protocol based intrusion prevention (Host-based intrusion prevention – HIPS)
* System and Application firewalls
* Policy-based registry, application, and process execution protection
* Policy-based control over USB and other removable storage devices
* Local vulnerability assessment based on eEye’s Retina® Network Security Scanner
* Attack and event reporting to REM Management Console

Site Info: http://www.eeye.com/html/products/blink/personal/index.html

-- M

I use Nod32 and so far ( 1 year ) I’m very satisfied about it.

I use Norton Antivirus and is ok