Hello,

It’s not necessarily a bad idea to look at independent test results, as well as see what sorts of certifications candidate anti-malware software might have, at least once you’ve gotten down to your short-list.

AV-Comparatives
AV-TEST
Dennis Technology Labs
ICSA Labs
PassMark Software
PC Security Labs
Veszprog Ltd
Virus Bulletin
Web Coast Labs

There are also a lot of research institutions and universities involved in testing anti-malware software, like Baylor University (Texas), Carnegie-Mellon (US), Harvard (US), Politechnique Montreal (Canada), Perdue University (US), Slovak University of Technology (Slovak Republic), SRI (US) UCSB (US), UCSD (US), University of Hamburg (Germany) and University of Karlsruhe (Germany), to name a few of the many, many organizations involved in looking at anti-malware software in some way.

One thing, though, that I would strongly recommend is that you look at reports and studies from multiple organizations over the course of several years. The reason is that testing methodology is difficult, and often even the best of these tests may have some sort of problems. There’s an organization called AMTSO (short for Anti Malware Testing Standards Organizatio) that is trying to provide some harmonization between vendors and testers to ensure that the public gets accurate data. Also, it’s important to keep in mind that test results are only valid for the period in which the tests were performed, and with the configuration and environment chosen by the tester. Looking at the results over a few years can help you determine if a program’s protection is doing better, worse or about the same over time.

That, coupled with the due diligence in other areas like piloting the software, having your legal department review the contract for any hidden gotchas, et cetera, should give you a solid basis on which to base your purchase decision.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

P.S. As an employee of an anti-malware company, I certainly have my own biases. You should be aware of that and take it into consideration when reading the above.

Morning everyone,

I wanted to ask everyone here in the forums what are good recommendations for remotely managed antivirus for business endpoints? Our 12 month renewal for Avast CloudCare is coming up by the end of October and I want to get input from others.

Previously we used Symantec Endpoint Protection before they sold out to Broadcom and Broadcom essentially doing away with SEP. Once the licenses ran out for that last year, we made a quick decision to go with Avast because it was inexpensive on TechSoup for nonprofits like ourselves.

Avast has worked OK during the past year, but I’ve found the managed control panel to be slow and somewhat clunky while endpoint installers are now topping 600mb when deploying manually. They do include a patch management services which does pretty good for non MS updates. But the MS updates conflict with Automate Connectwise that we get through an MSP who uses that to push MS updates. They do offer a remote connection service through the clients, which works as a backup if ConnectWise has an issue.

Because Avast was a last minute decision last year and I’m the only IT person in a company of > 160 staff, I have very little time to do anything other than help desk, so dedicated sandboxing is pretty much out of question.

My question to everyone here is, what do you use and recommend? Cost is going to be one of the driving factors in this. Currently I believe we pay about $17/seat for Avast with the above mentioned features. Where as Malwarebytes non-profit per seat cost was around $35.

Lastly, I know there are a ton of threads on this topic, but to be fair, they are all out of date and seem to offer comments of people complaining about yet another person asking about “best antivirus”. I’m not trying to be a pain, but with antivirus technology rapidly changing year after year and the fact I’m really relying on input from this site due to so many other IT responsibilities, I’m looking for serious replies and input only to where I can narrow down my selection.

Avast is still on the table… but I want to know if we can do better, especially in the management side of things.