I'm looking to move from McAfee VirusScan Enterprise to Kaspersky for our 300 PCs here. So far, I like what I'm seeing. Much lower resource allocation, which in turn makes the PC faster. Comparable admin kit to McAfee (though it could be better), and seemingly better detection of virii.

However, my boss wants me to get in touch with people who are using it in a corporate environment and ask them a few questions. If you have the time, could you touch on these concerns for me?

Why did you choose Kaspersky?
What product did it replace?
Are you satisfied with the product?
Did it deliver as advertised?
Did you have any implementation issues?
When you need support, how well do they respond?
Do you have any open issues?
Would you choose Kasperky again?

Thank you very much for your time

Maybe you should contact your local distributer or reseller and ask for them for customer contacts or reference customers ?!

I'm trying... my CDW rep is being slightly unhelpful in that respect.

My CDW rep called me back. Upon contacting Kaspersky, they were told that no clients contact information is ever released, for security purposes. That leads me to places such as this, to find people who are willing to give me a little info on their experience with Kaspersky. I'm not asking you to divulge potentially dangerous information about your company.... I don't even care what company you're with.

I'm gung-ho for KAV.... it's a huge savings over our current McAfee VSE, and seems to work much better.

Hello,

My opinion will not help you a lot, plus you're on the Kaspersky forum and you will probably not find people who will criticize the products, I don't think so.
Recently, a french well-known web site has published the first comparatives of Anti-Virus solution for Enterprise environment.

I can't find the link, but I remember that Kaspersky Lab was classified as the best solution for its detection rate (best reactivity agains new threat, updates frequency, deployment facilities and graphical Interface, whereas McAfee was select as the best Administration Console to manage Anti-Virus application (epo).

Administration Kit in version 7.0 is actually under development and according to the Alpha version it will be (I think) powerfull and as powerfull as McAfee admin console.

Regards,
DB

Try this
http://www.av-comparatives.org/

you may find most of the comparison for well known av products here.

We had Symantec Corporate AV two years ago, and got rid of it because the realtime protection totally hogged CPU and I personally don't like their admin console. We changed to Computer Associates eTrust last year, and liked the product for its simplicity and non-obtrusive nature.

However, at a Gartner symposium this year, I learned some statistics that were frightening about eTrust. Basically, the product does not do a very good job of protection, based on a comparison against competitors. I learned that KAV had the best detection rate and also did not consume PC resources. So, like you, we did an evaluation on 20 PCs (we have 200 total) over several weeks.

In a nutshell, we love KAV. I think they detect and remediate the highest percentage of threats (in fact, machines that we removed eTrust from and installed KAV found malware on these systems that KAV remediated). In addition, they have the most signature updates of any major competitor (we update every 2 hours). Lastly, I do like their admin console, I think it is intuitive and very powerful (indeed, they even provide de-install packages to remove your prior AV tool, how cool is that?).

Are there any downsides? Sure....recently, signature updates have caused messages on the user's PC that they need to reboot in order for them to take effect. Not sure why this is, I guess that KAV wants to scan startup areas based on new sigs and needs to reboot to do that. We have nicknamed Kaspersky "The Mad Russian" here because it does enforce pretty strict policies (vs. eTrust which never made a peep!).

I have since removed Symantec products from my home PCs and installed Kaspersky's consumer product because I like their technology so much.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for your reply, Jim! Very helpful information for me to pass on to my boss!

there ware some driver updates, this is why there was the need for the reboot (yes, kav is also able to update application modules over its update feature, not just the signatures). i am sure if you take a look in the update logs you will be able to confirm this and if you feel this to be a problem for you (for example you fear of possible problems that automatic installation of new drivers could cause), you can also disable it in the settings and update only the signatures.

as for nadams, i think Jim gave you one of the probably best possible advises, install a free trial on a small number of systems and test it for some time. as good and perfect as it can be for some, it could also be a no go for you if there are some special needs or network/workstation configurations.

To add my two cents....I just purchased Kaspersky for my network. I am having a bit of trouble with the management interface. Not a big deal but will take a bit to get used to. I can't comment to much on the product as I have only used it for about a week...except:

1. There has been a noticeable increase in client speed since moving them to Kaspersky (which is good).
2. Kaspersky immediately found (and removed) some spyware which was on my client(s) even though the clients were running the most recent Symantec rev.
3. The firewall/self protection/etc has stopped me form using some software on my network (i.e. remote control via Dameware). This to me is an indication of the quality of the product. I am confident I will be able to overcome thsi as well after I tweak the clients out.

I am moving from Symantec (after many years) as I am sick of their overweight products. In case you are interested here is my description of their current release:

https://forums.symantec.com/syment/board/me...p;thread.id=494

Bob

1) We have about 700 PCs/servers using KAV. We conducted a month long evalution of KAV and 6 of it's competitiors. The names you may know are McAfee, Trend Micro, Symantec, Bit Defender, F-Secure, and Panda. Symantec was removed from consideration because it was 3X the cost of any of it's competitors. Of the remaining products, KAV was equal to or better at detecting viruses and it's administrative console was vastly superior.

We are currently on V5, for reasons I will get into later.

2) We replaced Trend Micro as it's product was no longer capable of supporting an environment of our size. In the past, the Trend database would crash and cause us to have to reinstall the product everywhere to re-establish administrative access. So Trend's administrative console bugs had finally just wore us out.

3) Are we satisfied with KAV? I would have to answer no. While the administrative console and virus detection are excellent, the real time component is killing our engineering server environment - even with all the exclusions we've added. Simply copying a file from one drive to another takes twice as long once KAV is added to a server. And we're using high end Dell servers. So version 5's real time component has been the biggest complaint we receive from our engineers. We have spent months with KAV tech support in trying to improve this. So before anyone gets ticked off and jumps to conclusions, please be aware we have invested a significant amount of resources on this issue and are by no means new to the product.

Laptops are another concern as they take 3-5 minutes before they stabilize. This is caused by KAVs quick system check at startup which you cannot disable. (We have seen that V6 is better in this regard but we cannot use it just yet)

4) Did it deliver as Advertised? The AV protection has been very good so in that regard yes. The pattern file updates are becoming a glaring issue as twice in the past few months they have pushed out updates that have disabled computers in our environment. But V5 did exactly as it was supposed to, albeit a little slower than we would like.

5) Implmentation issues? There were zero implementation issues. It was easy and clean.

6) Support, how good are they?

We have found that US support is fast to reply and helpful. But we have also found that they do not seem to have any connections or influence with Russia. Let's start with an example:

7) Do you have any open issues?

V6 has a major flaw in it that causes machines to fall off the network if a VPN client was installed. I worked with the US Support team on this for 2 months and we determined the actual DLL that was the offender. To date, this problem has never been solved. Essentially the KAV NDIS adapter doesn't play nice with any of our VPN clients - and we use several different applicances from 2 vendors. Uninstalling does not help. Only disabling the KAV NDIS adapters allows the computers back on to a network.

After 60 days of working through this issue, we dropped as we felt we had done everything we could in getting this resolved. KAV knows about the issue, they know what DLL is causing it and it is well documented on these forums. To date, there has been no resolution and as a company we are stuck at V5 as we cannot afford to allow our AV product to disable our remote laptop users who billing our our clients at $1800 a day. This implementation would be a disaster.

So support tries to help but they are really unable to given how their company operates.

8) Would we choose them again?

While V6 has improved some performance issues at the hard-disk level, the VPN bug is simply a deal killer for us. We could not choose them going forward.

Let me say this, I still believe their ability to detect viruses is top notch. I believe their management interface is second to none. But we cannot renew given the issues we've encounted. It's possible that KAV (like Trend) simply isn't cut out to support a mid-to-large size enterprise environment.