What is our primary use case?
It is an antivirus and firewall security solution for our environment, not just on clients, but also on servers.
How has it helped my organization?
To be able to control what files or viruses are being scanned from one location.
We get staff to notify us when something pops up on ESET, just to keep them cautiously aware of threats out there. It is nice to get phone calls or emails from colleagues who are not in IT, and are concerned, "Hey, a pop-up showed up and something got blocked." This helps keep our staff security awareness high.
What is most valuable?
The Remote Administrator is the most valuable feature that ESET offers for us. Centralized management of our ESET environment is what I like about the Remote Administrator.
What needs improvement?
I would like more robust reporting as part of the Remote Administrator.
For how long have I used the solution?
One to three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is very scalable. I was able to connect six different locations and authenticate them using the ESET Remote Administrator.
How are customer service and support?
The tech support is awesome. They have a robust forum for customers to find answers to questions that they can't get from their teams. Also, their customer technical support team works very well with any problems that we forward them.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were using Norton before ESET. It was slowing our machines down, but then we also had old machines, as a university. Then, when we adopted ESET, it was a very strip-down software which didn't take up a lot of computer performance.
How was the initial setup?
There are two parts to setting it up:
- Simple: Just install it on the client.
- Complex: Send out all the remote agents to each device through the network, then the installation file through the network.
Installing was easy, but the setup was complex to get the remote installation working.
What about the implementation team?
ESET technical support helped me. It took eight hours with a conference call.
What was our ROI?
We have seen ROI.
Instead of installing ESET on each machine at each location, we just do it remotely. This has been a time saver for us.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The National University System dedicates 500 of their 5000 licenses to us, which is $14/yr per device. Most companies are paying $99 or $120 per device a year. With Norton, we were paying $40/yr per device. This cost reduction was another reason for switching vendors.
There is a cost when we need to extend, but ESET is great.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
The National University System (NUS) has been working with ESET for a couple of years. Because we are an affiliate under NUS, we inherited ESET.
We also have SonicWall and Barracuda on our shortlist of vendors.
What other advice do I have?
The product is versatile, and the company continues to bring out more products.
Before we installed the central management console, we were not able to pull any reports of how many threats were being blocked in our environment. So, we couldn't bargain a security budget with management without those reports and data of what is being blocked, showing how much we saved. Therefore, it improved our capabilities of asking for a security budget, as we collected the data that was coming in from all the client devices.
Context is louder than volume. You need the data in order to win your board.
*Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
