12
votes

What enterprise virus-scanning systems do you recommend?

4
  • Would also love some FREE solutions, if applicable, to any answers forthcoming.
    – Pure.Krome
    Apr 30, 2009 at 8:01
  • 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, 2010 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, 2010 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. Sep 9, 2011 at 14:54

9 Answers 9

15
votes

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

3
  • Well the least resource-hog is no AV at all. Did you consider it also? :)
    – blank3
    Jan 11, 2010 at 20:55
  • what others?
    – IAbstract
    Jun 19, 2010 at 23:33
  • @dbhoar: Avast, McAfee and Symantec were the 3 products we tried before settling on NOD32
    – Edmund Tay
    Jun 21, 2010 at 16:37
5
votes

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...

4
  • 1
    +1 definitely agree to NOT use McAfee. It's slow and does stupid things that don't help. Apr 30, 2009 at 8:58
  • 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
    – W4IK
    May 1, 2009 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 4, 2009 at 22:14
  • No one at McAfee has a sense of humor. Dec 13, 2011 at 21:22
4
votes

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.

4
  • Got to agree with this one, although my opinion is based on the version that was out about 8 years ago! Apr 30, 2009 at 8:03
  • In my previous job we had Symantec Corporate and it indeed was a resource hog.
    – macbirdie
    Apr 30, 2009 at 8:06
  • 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, 2009 at 8:10
  • +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, 2010 at 17:01
3
votes

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

0
1
vote

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.

1
vote

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!

0
votes

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.

0
votes

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

1
  • 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, 2010 at 21:41
0
votes

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...

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