Symantec Endpoint Security Reviews

It's good at detecting signature-based stuff and stopping that, but what Symantec misses, CrowdStrike would pick up. I'm hoping to move CrowdStrike 100% to get rid of Symantec.

It needs to die. In my opinion, Symantec was a really great security company, 10, 15 years ago. They went out, they bought all the great tools and then they never did anything with them. So they've just fallen behind and there's nothing that's going to work now to bring them back up the date that's going to regain user confidence.

In order to improve, I would like to see active remediation tools, where I can connect to systems and do things directly on the system without having to leave the tool.

I have been using this solution for five years. 

I would rate it a two out of ten because I think it is outdated, ancient, lacking the features that the current solutions have. And unfortunately, I think it's being passed around so much that Symantec's now Broadcom, that nobody's given it any of the attention or the love that it needs to keep it a viable solution. Ultimately, I think it's going to die.

We use this solution for its  antivirus capabilities   . It is an on-premises deployment.

Centralized & localized control of client machines ,  using the SEPM dashboard.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the antivirus and the protection against Ransomware/Malware/Zero day attacks and device control

I would really like some of the features that are available in Kaspersky Enterprise to be available in the client version of this solution.

In the next release of this solution, I would like to see more to do with malware, encryption technology, and controlling mobile devices. I would like to be able to protect my wireless equipment at that level.

I have been using this solution for 12 years.

I've had no issues with stability in the ten years that I have been using it.

This product is being pushed the maximum, and we are using it every day.

It is stable, and once you put in the policies, it does what it is supposed to do.

From my experience, I find scaling this solution is difficult. You have to work your way around it. It takes some time getting used to the admin dashboard before you can make any changes.

We have about sixty users in the company. Two of them are administrators and the remaining are end-users.

Technical support for this solution is ok. I have no issues with them.

We did not use another solution prior to using Symantec.

From my point of view, the initial setup of this solution was pretty easy.

Only one person is required for the maintenance and to handle support assistance. Everything is done remotely. You just push the changes across the network.

I performed the deployment myself, and it takes about an hour, or perhaps two hours at most.

Considering the features, the price of this solution is average. We pay our licensing fees on a yearly basis, and everything is included in that price. Whether it is via email or phone call, they do what needs to be done.

Evaluating fortigate client antivirus and security features 

My recommendation is that people should try this product.

In using this solution, I have learned a lot about our security and what needs to be done.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

I find QRadar and the Active Threat Defense the most valuable. The ATP, Active Theft Protection, is very good. They've got very solid detection rates from P2. Those and some of the other programs are very valuable.

The Centralized Management could be improved. The deployment is very limited. They can improve on reporting as well. If they can improve threat incident analysis, that would be great.

The solution itself is pretty comprehensive at this stage, and the features that we would like to be added to these are available as separate purchases, so I wouldn't that there's anything new that I need in there, they probably covered all the bases at this stage.

The solution is one hundred percent stable.

The solution is completely scalable.

Technical support is okay. I'm not completely satisfied with them.

The initial setup is pretty simple. I believe that the tools that are available to do the deployment are not up to standard as compared to some of the other products, and we deal with all the other products. We know exactly what is available and what is possible. Compared to the other products available, Symantec is lacking in that department.

I've been using this solution for more than twenty years. While Endpoint Protection has only existed for the past couple of years, the Symantec antivirus, I have been working with more than twenty years. It used to be Symantec antivirus and then it changed a couple of years ago to Symantec Endpoint Protection. So, we've been using it obviously since its inception.

In terms of advice to others, I would say to partner with somebody that actually knows how the product is implemented and configured. Get a partner that has the technical knowledge and can give onsite technical guidance, or support. All of these Endpoint Protection solutions are getting very complex. It's not a simple antivirus that you just simply deploy to get a few viruses. It is becoming a very complex thing to implement. People buy the products, and they don't know how to implement them, so they go and slap them there and then they get burnt and they get attacked by a virus or threat or something. They get their fingers burnt and then they say the product is rubbish, but it's not the product, it's that the product was not correctly configured. So, when buying a product, you need to partner with someone who can actually provide you with support on the product.

They're one of my favorite products and we're actively working with Kaspersky, McAfee, Sophos, ESET, and Sophos. Palo Alto is my favorite firewall. But on the antivirus or Endpoint Protection side, I have the greatest of confidence in Symantec. It's something I would use at home or in the business. That's what we use to protect the business, so it's probably the product I have the most confidence in.

I would rate this solution ten out of ten.

I like the ability to push it to a client, centrally from central consoles.

I like the integration of Active Directory. I like the ability for it to auto-enroll. You can add machines to the Active Directory and when it configures right, it automatically installs to those machines.

The firewall features are pretty good as well. I like the firewall and the intrusion prevention features, and just the basic anti-malware and anti-virus seems to be pretty effective as well.

Sometimes the interface can be a bit cumbersome, and maybe the help features. If you're not charged with administering the product and you don't do it every day it can sometimes be difficult to remember how to do the simple basic things, so some type of help or guidance for your most regular or frequent tasks would be good. Something similar to what the product called Serviceaid has. 

I also think that the website itself should be improved. They have so many products that when you actually look on their website and you look for helpful guidance you just tend to get lost because they seem to have so much going on. So, basically, a bit more intuitive help and guidance features, as well as more intuitive service information.

Some type of solution for mobile devices would be good. For mobile devices, it's drawing from a Windows-based client, so for many core clients for OSX and Linux machines, those OS could be integrated directly. There's no client for mobile devices except for IOS and Android devices.

It's not very stable I don't think. I'll didn't have any problems when it did not work, or episodes of crashing or anything but yeah, it's not very stable.

We don't do daily scans, we do weekly scans but it is used daily and obviously, it's got a real-time scan so it's in constant use.

I think it's very scalable, and I think you can manage the implementation as long as it's sort of implemented on the right sort of baseline platform, etc. It makes it pretty easy to scale up and add lots more users and even more servers to the implementation. We do plan to add more clients onto the system in the future.

I haven't had much cause to use technical support. I might have used them only a few times. The support is okay, it's just difficult to actually find the contact numbers or email addresses because their site is so cumbersome.

I wouldn't say it was straightforward. There wasn't anything complex, either. Once you've done it once or twice, which I have, it's not as complex as it could be. It really depends on the size of the installation you're doing and the number of clients, etc. So obviously the bigger the installation, the more thought you need to put into it. I'd probably lean towards saying it was complex, it's not straightforward.

We have approximately fifty users and only one admin, so I'm the only person who administers here. I think the largest installation I've had would probably be about 1000G's with about one, two, three, four, five, six, no about seven administrators, but yeah and here it's just about fifty devices.

We do the implementation by ourselves.

I would advise anyone to make sure they do their required reading before they implement. Before implementation, you need to do the reading on the best practices because obviously if you've got a larger implementation then you need to think about a few concerns. You need to think about resilient managing services as well. Also, before purchasing,  do the due diligence and look at alternative products to see if there's something else that would suit your needs better.

This solution is a bit cumbersome. Some of the things they can make them easier to do, and also because their website is a bit clunky, so makes it difficult to find the solutions you need.

I would rate this solution as an eight out of ten.

It's an antivirus solution. We need something centralized because we have hundreds of desktops and laptops. We have taken this solution to manage antivirus, security, etc., all together.

Symantec, as an antivirus solution, makes things far better on the management and the vulnerability scanning sides. From a management point of view, it is good.

The fact that it has centralized management is the most valuable feature.

In addition, the support from Symantec is very important. It is a global company and they give very good support. That is an important factor here because we are sitting in Africa and getting support on time can be a bit tougher. In this way, Symantec is a good fit for us.

Also, the console is very user-friendly. It is easy to understand, easy to play with it, easy to make up policies. And you can customize your policies. It's not like there's a set of policies that has been set out. Other products also have this kind of feature, but it is more user-friendly and a better product with better support.

We have talked to Symantec about a feature that is lacking. Any external device which is inserted into a computer should be subject to an auto-scan policy, to automatically scan it before accepting the device. Let's say I have a pen drive and there is a Trojan virus for which the signature is not updated. If the signature is not updated, then the system should automatically scan and understand that there is a foreign file and it should be blocked immediately. That is the one feature that I feel is missing. They need to make it more user-friendly, so that when anyone puts in a USB stick it will be scanned, popping up any problems before it is used. This is a feature they need to work on, in my opinion.

It is very stable.

For us, scalability is fine, there is no problem, no restriction, other than we cannot go beyond our licenses. If we are extending it, of course we need to pay for it. But it's not like something is restricting or blocking it. The scalability is okay. We have connected more than 1,200 computers and they are working well.

We have one staff member who maintains the solution. He is our network security guy and he is also Symantec-certified. We also have second-level support from Symantec. If anything is needed we get support from them. We pay them yearly for that.

Right now, we don't have plans to increase our usage of the solution.

The technical support is fine, no problem.

The initial setup is straightforward. I don't think it is complex. I have long experience as a system administrator. For me, as a technical person, it was straightforward. We definitely took support from Symantec and they helped us a lot in the deployment process.

Since it was a long time back, I don't remember exactly how long the deployment took. We keep updating it now. But I don't think it took more than three working days, including deployment and automating installation for all the workstations. We shifted from another antivirus to this one.

We had help from Symantec and their partners.

We have definitely seen return on investment.

We pay on a yearly basis and have a three-year contract.

Understand your environment and what kind of security product you're looking for. Every environment has different requirements. Everybody has different kinds of file formats and data classifications.

For Symantec is a good product for our environment. It helps us a lot. It provides seamless operation. It's not like we have to intervene every day. People are monitoring and, if they find a machine that is not working or not connected, they create a remote connection to see what the problem is and to fix it.

We are using Symantec Enterprise, but you have new threats coming into the world market and you definitely have to be up to date. We found information on IT Central Station and we set up a comparison of the technologies.

Every antivirus, in my experience, is only successful 95 percent of the time. No antivirus can tell you that you are 100 percent protected. The important part is how the backend works. If the backend is giving you support, they answer immediately and help you, that is important. In that way, Symantec is a good product and we are happy with it.

Primary usage is on endpoints, desktops, clients, and servers, and it's working okay.

It blocks malware, as it is supposed to.

We're able to tune it to work with our products.

I would like to see even more customization, the possibility to do whitelisting. It needs to be a little bit more liberal on whitelisting, even to use the name if needed, instead of hashes.

Stability is good.

We only have 10,000 endpoints so it's not that much, but it's working.

Depending on who you end up with, it can take a while before you get the correct support.

The out-of-the-box functionality, the vanilla setup, is okay, but then tuning is needed. Overall the setup is straightforward.

My most important criterion when selecting a vendor is that they are easy to work with.

I rate it at eight out of 10. When, say, Microsoft releases a new OS version twice a year, you never know if the current version of Symantec Endpoint Protection will support it. You can have a lag between when Microsoft releases a new client - and then the current version doesn't work correctly - and it could be some months between updates from Symantec.

Overall, it's really good product. It has saved us a lot of time and, most of the time, it's a self-playing piano.

I like the intrusion prevention and Sonar features. The features have always helped strengthen our client’s proactive protection shield. The detection rate is good. False positives are less, which makes it a "perfect zero-day vulnerability encounter."

As a service-centric company, we have advised Symantec endpoint solution to various clients. They have been satisfied with the quality Symantec offers. It is easy on maintenance, has brilliant support. What else would a business need? It has helped to protect the endpoint infra in an efficient manner.

As an Endpoint Security Expert, I have worked on multiple anti-virus solutions of different vendors. They are turning the table in market. There are many ways in which I see Symantec overshadowing the same in near future.

The deployment mechanism needs work. There are various vendors who have been coming up with endpoint agents as small as size of a delta definition.
There are various options and tweaking which can help save the administrators a lot of effort, such as:

• Multi-domain policy options for exceptions and global blocks
• Deploying intelligent updates remotely
• Deleting AV cache remotely
• More versatile dashboard with more custom add-ons to monitor infra.

I see Symantec as being late in releasing certified definitions for the same day while other vendors are lightning fast. I would like to see a GUP monitoring tool being supported.

We have been using this solution for six years.

The Symantec agent is bulky in comparison to various vendors. It creates stability issues. We need a supported utility to wipe clear Symantec for a fresh installation during troubleshooting.

Symantec Customer support is very good. Indeed, it is one of the best so far. The KB articles are good and helpful.

We have worked with Sophos, McAfee, and F-Secure. All have pros and cons. The console management and policy options are pretty sorted in Symantec, so it always has a upper hand over other products.

I find other vendors' console options pretty good. Remotely evoking agent and real time results were good. Symantec’s command status is holding it back from a swift administration.

We implemented it ourselves. I have already mentioned that we do need real time results on the console and a better deployment mechanism. We have to work with custom scripts for the removal of third-party software which makes it bit tricky.

I never dealt in purchases, so I have no input.

Go for it. Symantec is a promising vendor and indeed a market leader in various technologies.

• It is stable
• No maintenance is required after a successful installation phase
• It is more than a classic Anti-virus solution: both SONAR and IPS help to protect the system
• The application and device policies are great features to help administration

After the initial setup, you don’t have to worry about the AV clients. It simply works.

The management of the server is a bit complex. It takes time get used to it. When upgrading the software for clients, you have to link the upgrade package to every sub-folder, and there is no inheritance.

We have used this solution for three years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

We needed help for one or two issues and the support team was good.

We used another product and we switched to SEP because of the costs.

The initial setup was straightforward. The ability of the package to uninstall the old AV was a big plus in my case.

I’d say SEP deserves the money.

We did not evaluable other options. Anti-virus is not something you can test in 3-4 days. The pros and cons take time to show up.

Before installation, take your time to plan how you will manage your environment. If you already have another AV, please first check if SEP can auto-uninstall the old AV.