Determining which infrastructure products to use on a network can be extremely difficult.  Take for example, corporate anti virus & backup software: there are dozens of options available and everyone will gladly share articles and reviews claiming their product is the best.   Some people now claim that antivirus in particular (a.k.a. ‘client security’ software) has become such a commodity that it really doesn’t matter which vendor you go with, as long as you’ve got something.

I beg to differ.

Over the years we’ve tested lots of different antivirus products; some have been great, some have been OK, and some have been shockingly horrible.  But the antivirus playing field has never been static: some products get better, and some get far worse over time.

A recent visible example of this is with Symantec’s corporate products: they used to produce great software (this is, after all, the company which used to produce Norton Utilities!)  Their antivirus product was straightforward, relatively lightweight, and did the job very effectively.  Over the last few years there has been a push to tack on hundreds of features (demanded by buzzword-happy CIOs) and the product has become a hulking, lumbering giant which is difficult to manage and not nearly as effective against viruses as before! We’ve had below average results with many of Symantec’s competitors as well: McAfee, Panda, and CA’s eTrust all have aspects which absolutely drive us up the wall–so we settled on specifying Trend Micro a few years back and have been happy ever since.  (If you’re looking for new antivirus software,  I just saved you a ton of frustration!

Symantec is also now in the process of ruining the most widely-used backup software on the planet, Backup Exec.  When Symantec purchased Veritas a few years back we shuddered to think what would happen to Backup Exec–and our suspicions were unfortunately well-founded.  Backup Exec is tweaky, brittle and difficult to manage: we live in a constant state of patching & re-patching Backup Exec servers since Symantec bought them, and backup jobs (and even Backup Exec services) seem to fail randomly at times for no good reason regardless of hardware configuration.   Backup software is a bit more difficult to torture test than antivirus software, so though we are actively looking for an alternative we have not yet found one which meets all of our requirements.

My hope is that Symantec will realize they’re starting to lose market share to some of their smaller, more nimble competitors–and start putting money back into redeveloping the cores of these products.  But it is a huge company with entrenched egos–so we may not see improvement in their software for quite some time.

I think companies like Symantec are really quick to try to address buzzwords with fancy, shiny new software–but it’s really important not to forget your core competencies.  Backups and antivirus have been necessary evils for decades, and though the mechanisms may change over time it’s not likely that these concepts will disappear entirely.

If you have comments on this article you can reply here, or e-mail me privately at bdp@bdpnetworks.com

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