I formed a good impression of Symantec Endpoint Security when we used a penetration tool on it and on other anti-malware solutions as part of a proof of concept. Symantec was one of the best in that penetration test and that was a surprise for me because I thought it would not be that good. But it gave us really good results in the penetration test.

I have used different solutions, but I prefer Symantec's cloud solution when compared with, for example, CrowdStrike.

I previously worked with McAfee, Kaspersky, and a couple of others, but computer threats were much different in 2003, and people were mainly worried about viruses. Compared to other solutions at the time, Symantec seemed to have more reliable and faster releases of definition and would update files when new threats were discovered.

They all basically had the same functionality, but the most striking difference that I found in the evaluation process was Symantec's definition update process was quicker and more reliable. They would sometimes have the definition deployed 24 to 36 hours before some of the others. Kaspersky was always a good four or five days behind Symantec on virus definitions. They usually averaged about 12 to 14 hours ahead of McAfee.

We also considered Trend Micro and Carbon Black. Symantec's sales team won by lowering the price and adding some features in the package like web security services and Symantec EDR.

We evaluated Trend Micro, McAfee, and several open-source tools like Norton. We chose Symantec because it provides excellent features and frequent security updates, and the trial version of the product performed very well, exceeding our expectations.

When our subscription to Kaspersky ended, we were tasked with comparing features between different solutions. The three options we considered were Symantec, Kaspersky, and Sophos.

One of the things that we liked about Symantec is the low resource utilization. I am not the person who completed the analysis but I know that the fact it is lightweight was one factor.

We liked the functionality that Sophos provided but the deployment scenario functionality was not useful for the workstations in our environment. It involved deploying the dashboard to workstations in the cloud, which is not our preferred approach.

Kaspersky has richer reporting capabilities. This is an area that could be enhanced in our Symantec solution.

We did a PoC of McAfee, Trend Micro, and other solutions in our environment. Symantec was better. So, we went for it.

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.

We already had our eyes set on Symantec because it was something that some of our clients had been using.

I always tell my colleagues in the IT space that Symantec is one of the best antivirus solutions that we have used. Most of our clients, before we approach them, use different solutions so we do a test. We put a virus on their PC to see if their antivirus is able to detect it, and we find that it does not detect that there is a virus or an intrusion on the device. Once we install Symantec, it blocks everything and immediately detects that there is malware or an intrusion on the PC that needs attention.

Symantec is the best when it comes to other antiviruses and endpoint solutions in the global market.

When compared to other solutions, I would give Symantec Endpoint Protection 4.5 out of five. It has interesting features, starting with Active Directory Security. There is no other endpoint solution that will help you in preventing lateral-movement attacks on Active Directory. And Active Directory is one of the more critical assets within an organization. Nine out of 10 organizations use Active Directory, and it is so often a targeted asset. Symantec is the only product that has Active Directory security.

Also, it enables us to have a hybrid architecture in which we can have Symantec Endpoint Security on-prem and integrated with the cloud. We can also have the API integrated into our SIEM and SOAR.

We have been using other endpoint security products as well. The advantage of Symantec is that you don't need a separate product to protect your assets such as Linux or Android. It's equivalent to Intune where we can have a single dashboard and have all devices onboarded. 

On top of that, with Symantec, we have application control and DLP to a certain extent. It means we don't have to have multiple products running in the ecosystem. It acts as a consolidated solution with multiple features and functionalities. This reduces the costs and resources that you would need to manage different products. When you have different products, it leads to cumbersome processes and it is very complex to manage infrastructure. Having Symantec on the cloud makes endpoint protection seamless. We can download the agent, run it, and we are up and running within 30 minutes.

When we go for a product review, we normally do a PoC to understand how the application will scale our innovation before adding it into our pipeline. 

Other solutions have the detection and response feature.

We were looking at Microsoft Defender Antivirus due to the fact that we were looking at switching away from Symantec.

Today, we are looking at Kaspersky. We want to see if it can handle dealing with Windows updates in a better way than Symantec. They have some interesting features that take a pretty deep look inside the Windows system in order to protect it. We feel the antivirus needs to go farther into the Windows system and down to the endpoints themselves and really take a look around in order to effectively protect it from attacks. We're currently searching for more information to see how Kaspersky stacks up.

The pricing is also quite different between the two solutions and this may affect our decision as well.

We did evaluate a number of other vendors. We entertained some RFPs and we did testing on four other competing products. There was one other competitor that was close. The main factor that tilted us toward CrowdStrike is that they did make a last-minute significant cut in price to their offer. I think they reduced it by something like 30% or 40%.

CrowdStrike has been in the business longer and is a bigger company than the runner up as well. To us, that mattered. If there is winnowing out of competitors, if the market actually shrinks and there are a few big players in five years, we want to be sure that we're with one of the big players that are going to make it.

We spoke with some vendors who recommended Sophos and Crowdstrike. While Crowdstrike has some incredible features, it's four times the cost.

Sophos is supposed to handle our needs.

Crowdstrike could handle our needs and then some, but we couldn't justify the cost.

We do evaluate other solutions when a customer asks for a comparison with another solution, such as Sophos. We then need to do a PoC in the customer environment.

I heard a lot about McAfee, and their reporting feature is very good compared to Symantec.

We are currently testing Cisco Secure Endpoint for endpoint protection, and we have been using it for one year. I prefer it because Cisco is one of the big network and security vendors, so when they sell a product, they're sure about the whole performance of the product. The product must have a good reputation because the brand itself says something. 

I have evaluated McAfee and Kaspersky.

We are looking at CrowdStrike and Microsoft Defender.

Because we're not in the Top 200 in Symantec, we don't get the traction and escalations, but more importantly, if I look at the market leaders, it's very much Microsoft or CrowdStrike, and Broadcom Symantec is nowhere near the leading endpoint security in Gartner.

We want one that is multi-platform so that we can receive consistent and comprehensive reporting and alerts across all platforms. We're looking for a SaaS-based solution, which means it's all cloud-based and has advanced threat protection, including machine learning for zero-day attacks, as well as the ability to detect vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in real-time. One that's able to do memory scanning for malicious code threat hunting.

If you do a comparison between Symantec and Sophos, then you can easily see the comparative advantages Sophos has over Symantec. Symantec should study it in order to gain an edge in the industry and to better understand the areas to improve on, and what additional features to add.

Many, there are numerous great solutions in this market and they all offer great protection. The differences are in the feature sets, some for example don't have firewall, device control or Intrusion Preventions, or for example don't have the scalability required to deploy to companies that have hundreds of remote offices that have a few computers and hardly any bandwidth, and they can cause bottlenecks.

We evaluated one other antivirus, but I forgot its name. Symantec Endpoint Security was way better compared to that product.

We were going through the multiple products out on the market and we chose Symantec, because we had proposed multiple products to the client and the client had chosen Symantec for these two perspectives: One is for the best service and support, which Symantec provides, and the other is the pricing, which was a constraint for our client.

I was not the one who implemented Symantec at our company. The decision was made before I arrived and I inherited the product.  

I am now researching products in consideration of deploying a replacement option for Symantec because it is not totally meeting our security needs.  

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

We may switch to another solution and we are evaluating a variety of options currently. We have not come to a decision just yet. We simply want to see what else is on the market and how this product stands up to other solutions. We're mostly just curious to see what is happening in the space. We've looked at, for example, CrowdStrike, among others.

When I came to this company they were already using Symantec.

Symantec is a good solution. I recommend it over some other products. There are two or three products that can help, such as Kaspersky. Every solution has its advantages and disadvantages. It depends on your choice or needs.

Broadcom's support is friendly and very professional. However, in Pakistan, the support team takes more time than Trend Micro or Sophos to reach the bottom, as their policies are under review. A strategy should be employed to open this to Pakistan, as well. As such, a delay occurs, something which occasionally comes about indirectly. The support itself is good, but the issue which needs to be addressed concerns the promptness with which an assigned engineer can address each ticket we open.

Our company used Norton Anti-Virus previously.  But, I was not at the company during that time.

I evaluated other options like McAfee and Sophos, but they weren’t good enough for me.

Before choosing Symantec, I tried Apex One from Trend Micro. Symantec is better because it is more up to date with viruses and malware signatures. 

I have evaluated Kaspersky, CrowdStrike, and Sophos solutions.

We are currently looking for other products that we can replace Symantec with. Within the next nine months, we will have evaluated several products and selected one that is more suitable.

We are switching because Symantec has been sold to Broadcom, and Broadcom no longer has an office in Hong Kong. We want to have a product that has local support available.

One of the reasons that we are changing products is because we want behavior-based detection instead of something that is signature-based. Symantec has products that fit these requirements but we won't be considering them because of the support issues. We won't be looking any further into Symantec products and don't plan on comparing any of the features that they have.

I was not at this company when the solution was selected.

I believe there were other products we evaluated before going with the solution. 

We are currently evaluating other products because we are migrating, now that we are no longer receiving the proper technical support.

We currently use Micro Trend because of our partnership company uses it with over 100 organizations.

We have been working with Sophos for a couple of years now, and we finally decided to make it official and move forward with them instead of Symantec. I like the Sophos story. I like their solution. I like their holistic approach. And their support is really great.

They did evaluate other solutions including Sophos, ESET, McAfee, and Kaspersky. We did not find these as user-friendly.

 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.

Evaluating fortigate client antivirus and security features 

When I joined my office, they were already using this product.

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.

Back in the day, when I worked for a distributor, there were other products available, that were cheaper - this is more of a New Zealand example - but they didn't have the functionality. However, because of the small businesses we were working with, they were good enough. 

That is a challenge: having an enterprise product like SEP competing against a cheaper product like Sophos or ESET. The latter are cheaper, but you don't get quite the same scalability, functionality, etc.

Yes,I would not name any :)

We are currently exploring the option of upgrading this solution with a product from CrowdStrike or Symantec.

The vendors on our shortlist were Trend Micro and Kaspersky.

We evaluated Trend Micro and Kaspersky.

Other vendors that we evaluated were Kaspersky and McAfee.

Trend Micro and Kaspersky.

We evaluated McAfee.

I also have experience using Forcepoint and Websense Content Gateway. 

Yes, Kaspersky Enterprise.

McAfee and Trend Micro.

We were evaluating other products, but according to this product's technology and the support, in these areas we thought that Symantec would be the right product.