Symantec Endpoint Security Reviews

We work with Symantec DLP and Endpoint Protection as our main security solutions. We have deployed Endpoint Protection for a few customers and for our own organization as a test: Endpoint Protection, Email Security, and DLP.

We are a partner but we are a user as well. Our company has more than 100 employees and our group, which is made up of different companies, has more than 400 employees, and we are planning to deploy it for our group. Our company is the system integrator, while other companies within the group are service providers or different types of service integrators for areas like fintech.

It has improved our productivity and, from a security point of view, we feel safe from spam. For endpoint protection, we are not facing problems now.

I cannot say the stability is excellent, but it is very good.

Scalability, of course, is good. They acquire different companies sometimes and they adapt their different technologies.

We get good support from Symantec. We find that during integration, if we face any problems, we get a good response from the OEM and we solve them very quickly. Technical support is very good, they have a toll-free number.

We didn't have anything at this scale. We just used Kaspersky as an antivirus, but we are not using it now, we are using Symantec Endpoint Protection which covers everything. Symantec is better, it covers more requirements. Antivirus solutions only cover some basics, but Endpoint Protection is the next generation. It covers antivirus, spamware, ransomware; all this is covered through Endpoint Protection.

We selected Symantec because it is at the top of industry reviews. We also know that globally, Symantec spends a lot of money for R&D and we believe it will remain up to the mark.

We also use Symantec Email Security which improves our productivity and protects our valuable data. Email Isolation is the only feature which the others don't have. When we use it we find that we are free from phishing mail, etc.

The setup was straightforward. It takes very little time. It's not that complex.

I have not actually done an ROI calculation, but from what I understand, considering the cost and complexity and the technical support and deployment, if I consider all these things, the return on investment is good.

Pricing and licensing for our country is very good. It's not that expensive and the endpoint security is very good. It's not as cheap as some others, but they are not as good.

 We are evaluating Imperva, as we have some customer requests to do a PoC on that, as well as other product like F5 and A10. We have the PoC boxes for A10 for load-balancing and DDoS. We also have some NGFWs, like Check Point - we are doing a PoC and testing it as a firewall and as endpoint protection. CyberArk is another among the products we are focusing on for our customers.

Our market is very aware of Symantec, A10, and F5. F5 is predominant and, obviously, there is Cisco as well, which is a dominant company from a firewall point of view. We don't push all of their security products, like FirePower etc., because we understand that they are not a leader for firewalls. Palo Alto, Check Point, and Fortinet have been leaders in the last few years. 

But we are focusing on Check Point and Palo Alto. They are slowly growing and customers are buying their NGFWs and their endpoint protection or some other security product they have, for double-protection.

Since we have done two very successful PoCs, one live PoC for my largest customer, which is in government, and another for a private company, I recommend that other customers take the Symantec solution as their main security: I prefer Endpoint, Email Security, and DLP. Symantec has other solutions which I don't prefer. They have network analyzers and WAF but I prefer the Imperva WAF, which is better.

In our company, most of the 100 people are using this solution and their roles range from management to normal end-user. We have three staff, maximum, for maintenance, and their roles are IT administrator, and system managers. We do plan to increase our usage.

I would rate this product at eight out of ten, based on the technical support, cost, and their local presence as well.

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.

A couple of our customers have deployed and are using Symantec Endpoint Protection.

I joined COMPAREX eight months back, and they have been using Symantec Endpoint Protection for two and a half years.

Symantec has cloud-based endpoint protection, so whether a user is off the network or on the network, the endpoint will be protected by the cloud.

It has very unique features, which are not available with other vendors. E.g., there is a feature called SONAR.

You can integrate it using ATP, so all the endpoints communicate to each other on the security platform. 

17 million sensors are fitted all over the world. 

About four years back, Symantec's signature was very heavy and their signature patch was around 200MB or 300MB files.

Symantec Endpoint Protection is stable product, if you compare it other vendors, like McAfee or Trend Micro. McAfee was acquired by the Intel, who is very not strong in security patterns.

Our German team manages the maintenance.

The scalability is okay. I would rate it as a nine out of ten. Users are a bit afraid of the integration with ATP, as it is increasing scan times when downloading up to two to seven seconds.

We have around 2500 employee over all the globe. All the endpoints on laptops or desktops are running Symantec Endpoint Protection. Apart from that, we have multiple customers who have deployed the Symantec Endpoint Protection solution.

The technical support is very good. They have an Indian support team, so there are no delays in receiving support.

Their R&D teams are very strong in remediation.

We were previously using Trend Micro Smart Protection Complete.

The initial setup is very straightforward, not complex.

Deployment time depends on the user size. E.g., 200 users can be implemented in two days.

We have a dedicated delivery team to deploy the solution.

It is very easy to configure. There are no challenges when implementing this solution.

We have seen ROI.

Each annual client license is around 1200 or 1600 INR.

Zero-day threat or advanced attacks should be part of the endpoint. The product should not require you to buy a separate license.

It is a very good product. They are a very strong leader in the Indian market.

We are a solution provider for end customers like Telco, banks, etc. We are also a Symantec partner and reseller. Not only do we use it but we also position this solution for customers.

We have a telecom company that was using Kaspersky and they still had some vulnerabilities and attacks and we discussed with them and succeeded in presenting this solution. The one we proposed was Symantec Protection Suite, SPS Enterprise Edition, for about more 1,100 endpoints, exactly 1,100 users. We also implemented the mailer for Symantec Messaging Gateway for spam protection. Until now they used the solution and they are very satisfied with it. We started with SEP 12.1 but later they upgraded to SEP 14.

We had a bank that we were working with and they had a challenge in which they needed to protect against vulnerability. They had previously used Kaspersky, we discussed and told them that Symantec is capable and is able to address their specific challenges. We gave them a trial version. When they started they found it very easy; not easy to implement but easy to use. We started with the headquarters here and later we also implemented it for all the subsidiaries in the region, in other countries. They have a centralized solution, so they can help other countries in management. 

We had to position Symantec in big companies like Telco and several banks. With this solution, you also get the Protection Suite, endpoint protection, SEP, and you also have the Mail Security and Messaging Gateway. It's really integrative and our customers find it very valuable. It addresses almost all of the challenges on security for endpoint messaging. Symantec is going to be used much more because of its features.

The mobility solution should be improved. You need to separately purchase mobile, like a smartphone with Android and so on, you need to buy it separately with SAP, for example. It would be better for the user to use the same solution with all devices, even laptops, desktops, server and so on. They should also use the same endpoints for mobile devices. 

There are a few negative points. They should separate the feature for each separate solution for mobile devices. The second one is about the price, it's expensive. Finally, the third would be the complexity of implementation.

It is very stable. Even the customers don't really complain compared to other solutions. 

It is very scalable.  

Their technical support is reactive. When you have an issue, you just log a service request and you can find an engineer to help you. I would rate their technical support a nine out of ten. We're very confident that whenever we have an issue we can find the solution. It also depends on the support you choose. We have 24-hour support.

We also use McAfee because of the scalability. It had the issue that it consumed too many resources and for vulnerabilities, sometimes there are some direct varieties you cannot delete.

The initial setup is a little bit complex. You need to have a certain level of training before being able to set up it. What is nice is that you can remotely install the set up on all of the infrastructures from the server, the SAPM, that is the Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager, you can manage all the endpoints but it's not really easy to set up or to configure the policies. Sometimes customers find it a little bit difficult to implement for the configuration because you need some knowledge to implement the feature.

The setup depends on the issues of the network. The bottom line is if the network is really mastered, the policies on the network are really mastered in around three to four days for the new companies.

We only need one person who is well trained to manage and support this solution. 

It's not planned yet to switch to another product but we can potentially implement Cisco as we are also a Cisco partner and we find it sometime interesting when requested by the customer. But we push and we recommend Symantec.

This solution is very effective. It can really address the challenges but you need to have training in order to be able to effectively implement it. If you don't fully know how to implement it you can't use the features very usefully.

I would rate it a nine out of ten because of its ability to address challenges and because of the completeness of the solution.

Standard use case: firewall, malware, app/device control, reporting of compliance, etc. We use other features too.

A secure stable product, and good customer service of this product from the vendor. Waiting to see how the cloud version pans out.

• Application/device control. Wish encryption detection was integrated though. 
• Good standard malware detection via classic defs and newer heuristic controls.

• Device encryption status and coding off of said status. 
• Better inherent checks against duplicate IDs.

The most valuable features of this solution are deployment, management and finding sources of potential viruses that hack the system.

I think the CPU dependency should be enhanced. In addition, some device control features are in need of enhancements. 

I find it is the most reliable solution in the market. 

• Primary endpoint protection for our office. 

It was replaced with my MSP's contracted solution, but that's being replaced by our own solution.

It protected well enough, but we ran Malwarebytes in conjunction to help protect against zero-day exploits/malware issues that occasionally slipped through.

We were disappointed that we were stuck with its local admin server for so long when other solutions had cloud management.

• An easier management portal
• Setting up and managing profiles was overly complex
• An easier cloud management portal would be appreciated.

The primary key is because it doesn't impact much in the performance of the endpoint.

For me, the end point is almost a commodity. So, an advantage with Symantec is the integration. The integration with our two directories for taking control to administrate people, and then follow up with the segmentation to different people. To be able to manage a subset of the endpoint registering the solution, the distribution is in geographical sounds. The dashboard can be emailed, and I can receive the solution.

I find the most valuable features are the security features that have been developed in the past few years. 

A good improvement would be altering the console in the console manager. Sometimes we need to add and improve the security to access to the console because the indicators and we can take management activities into the console, and it's, nice to have to improve the security access to the console.

It is very stable. I do not have any problems with it at all. 

I only use the technical support once or twice a year. I find that sometimes they are a bit slow to find a solution. 

The most imprortant criteria for me to find a proper solution in this sphere are:

• Knowledge of the market
• Study of the solution

I also looked at McAffe, but I noticed that Symantec was the better performing solution when I researched respected user performance.