which is the best anti virus for a server

Another vote for Sophos here. Only disclaimer is your AV server needs an internet connection, updating central definitions manually is far more effort than it should be.
 
Never heard of Sophos?? Do not tell your customers that, they will lose whatever confidence they have in you right there and then!!

As much as people bash it I do still quite like McAfee managed by ePO, never had a problem with it here or at my previous work.

If I were to go somewhere else tomorrow and someone said pick us some AV I'd probably pick McAfee or Sophos tbh, as good as ESET is there's just something that niggles with me for using it for a large number of machines. I do currently use it for a handful (talking about 5) machines in a corporate environment.

Ooh forgot we're also using some Panda web managed AV for a project we're providing the IT infrastructure for, seems alright but again wouldn't want to use it for a large corporate estate.
 
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tntcoder said:
Certainly avoid Kaspersky :p
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Hate it with a passion ;)

Remember a chat I had with a very well informed security bod who basically said avoid Kaspersky and anything else created by the Russians or Chinese, and he highly rated Sophos as his personal choice (he was American, ex military, NSA, Nato etc).


ruffneck said:
I agree, mainly because of its management console ePO
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Yup once you work out how it all works with the policies etc the management is excellent.

I only upgraded us from ePO 4 to 4.5 a couple of months ago and that was an improvement as well.
 
Avoid CA like the plague.

Sophos is the daddy, management and integration tools are a joy to use. SBS is great if you don't need the full EM for a small environment.
 
We've run into some issues with Sophos lately. It seems to be sucking up resources like nobodies business, which is a real problem on XenApp servers.

I've also found several desktops where nasties have infected the machine & junked sophos, despite them being fully windows patched & sophos updated.

I quite like Nod32, seems to just get on with it, but not quite sure it'll fit in our environment.
 
An office I do work for has Server 2003 with several machines running terminal services of it. These machines are using Microsoft Security Essentials and it seems to be doing the job.

Since MSE doesn't work on Server 2003 and the same with several others, I would like to know what you guys would recommend as a good AV for the server? Why can't you just stick a copy of Kaspersky etc onto it for £20-£40 like you do with your home machine? It seems that a lot of the av companies want you to pay for a 5-user package instead of just a single license copy for the one server machine.?

Cheers for any suggestions
 
McAfee is great for the management side of things within ePO, but the VirusScan scans are complete resource hogs.
 
Another Vote for McAfee, been using it a loooong time and with EPO it's vastly improved.

Though I'm yet to find a perfect one. We had quite prompt update policies and got hit last year by the big false positive that broke windows installs. But generally speaking that's the only time it's broken something, both NOD32 and Slowphos have had many more albeit slightly lower profile false positives.

I'm also loving the irony of an AV thread started by a guy called Trojan and with posts from another called Major Disaster.
 
Ahh the joy of Savservice hogging local machine resources. Absolutely love having certain scanning modes disabled to allow a user to even move their mouse, let alone use their machine.

All AV comes with it's problems and most seem to have become more and more bloated over time but it's pretty annoying when the AV product is doing more harm than the virii that it's supposed to prevent.
 
We tested Mcafee EPO 4.5 against ESET NOD32.

Mcafee won by a significant margin. Once you created your custom VSE package and deployed through the admin console it was a dream.

ESET management was appauling, the version we tested didn't even integrate with AD :eek:
 
+1 for McAfee - their ePO is the best thing going in AV. There's also no reboots required for patches and updates, nor is there any forced obsolescence, unlike the nonsense that Sophos pulls.. :eek: :mad:
 
Sophos Endpoint Protection, it has the best admin experiance bar none. the level of intergrated features into the AV is excellent, full endpoint protection, including DLC. what more could you want.
 
Sophos is probably the easiest I've seen to rollout and manage. The most complicated thing I had to do was a firewall policy and enabling remote reg on the clients.

I'd rank it above NOD on the grounds that it's much easier to work with, that said though it's not very good at stopping malware, if you're lucky it might detect it (probably won't be able to get rid of it though). It's best to have a copy of Malwarebytes handy.
 
Don't get me started on Sophos. Had to do an upgrade from 3.x to 4.5. That meant 3.x->4.0->4.5. It took them a MONTH to get the console working properly so i could actually open it. Still can't push install to clients properly.

NOD32 on the other hand seems to work a treat!
 
While the management side of McAfee may be great the client side scanning engine is a massive resource hog. Having done tests with a particular piece of work the completion rate with McAffee enabled was twice as long. Utterly unacceptable. Even with on-demand scanning turned off the overhead was still bad. Frequent cases of multi-second lock-ups while doing things (which when typing a line of text can be very distracting). Its not like I have a slow machine (2 * Xeon with 4 cores each). Overall the running cost for this AV is just too high as it impacts productivity too much.
Long time since I used Sophos, but it didn't cause any issues like this when I did.
 
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