End Point Protection Comparison - Report Example

End Point Protection Comparison Name Number Course Tutor Date INTRODUCTION The IT infrastructure of an organization is usually protected by a multi-layered security model starting with a network firewall on the most outer layer and extending to each client protected by the endpoint security software on the most internal layer. Endpoint security software always does the impact of influencing the system’s performance in a more or less noticeable manner as it scans the system for malware attacks. Sophos is a hardware and software security developer and vendor providing end-point encryption, network, email, and mobile products. It largely focuses on offering security to business enterprises and organizations. The company is headquartered in Massachusetts as well as other co-headquarters in England, UK and Burlington. Initially the company primarily sold security technologies in the UK such as encryption tools and antivirus for end users, private and business entities. Over time, it has acquired a number of technology companies elevating it to the level of other industry big players such as Kaspersky and McAfee. It has a workforce of over 1700 employees distributed all over the globe and competes in antivirus industry against major players such as Avira, Symantec and F-Secure. Symantec Corporation is a computer security company specializing in backup and availability solutions software. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California. It is a Fortune 500 company and competes with other big antivirus developers. Symantec’s certificate authority is the most used according to W3Techs, competing with DigiCert, Entrust, GlobalSign, Go Daddy and Comodo. Symantec’s Norton products include Norton 360, Norton Antivirus, Norton Internet Security, Norton SystemWorks, Norton Save and Restore, Norton Ghost, Norton Smartphone Security, Norton Online Backup among other products. The company generates its revenue from software designs for companies and large business entities. Its flagship Enterprise security software is Symantec Endpoint Protection and Symantec protection Suite for five or more users. McAfee is a security technology company active in the design and production of software solutions for protecting internet connected devices from malicious content. McAfee supplies security solutions for servers, laptops and desktops, mobile voice and data devices and other devices connected for home PCs and corporate network systems. The company is worth 1,382 million EUR and is headquartered in Santa Clara California. As of February 2011, the company was sold off and became a fully owned subsidiary of Intel. McAfee is one of the few security technology companies actively involved in practically all areas of security spectrum. It serves a large section of customers; large corporations, governmental institutions, SMEs, and end-consumers. COMPARISON The comparison of the three security solution vendors will be based on the following; License Model Symantec licensing models include three portfolios; Express license program offering purchases with bulk discounts without complicated products Reward license programs which offer large discounts and the ability to consolidate all the purchases of associated companies Government license programs specifically tailor made for government offices. Symantec issues a per-device and a per-user license for its products. Enterprise Vaults ends user license is an example of its per user licensing model. EULA covers the number of mailboxes in an organization excluding inactive mailboxes, group mail boxes and multiple mailboxes. Other products such as Brightmail Message Filter and malware software are licensed by the number of users using them or being protected by the software. McAfee has two forms of licensing; perpetual and subscription. Subscription licenses was introduced in January 2001 and separates entitlement of the software maintenance from entitlement to use of the software. Customers are required to obtain a current Technical Support agreement in order to be entitled to software maintenance. Licensing is issued on a two-year term with the first year including Technical support while the second year Technical Support is accorded after purchase of an additional one YEAR Technical support. Perpetual license is issued by McAfee for clients who endear an unlimited software license term backed by annual renewal Technical Support contract. A customer is required to choose an appropriate Technical Support agreement to access entitlement to software maintenance under this license. User limitation Sophos provide all-in-one security license across all the organizations platforms. With its End-user Protection Suite, an organizations needs including all users and all the devices no matter the number are protected. Sophos provides endpoint security, mobile device management, web protection, data protection, email protection and more features in a single license. Additional features include 24/7 support, home use, and free updates and upgrades. Sophos provide two licensing choices; a cloud managed package licensed per user and on-premise software license. The cloud package can be managed virtually from a simple web console without the need for installation and maintenance. This version provides automatic software and threat updates and is paid per the number of users. On-premise software is licensed per user and depends on the needs of the organization except the End-user Protection Suite package which does not limit the number of users. Users are limited to the version of software delivered by McAfee during purchase and does not include subsequent versions, upgrades, updates, revisions, modifications and maintenance. Thus a user has to purchase a new license or contract for a new update. This pushes the cost of McAfee antivirus solutions upwards and is the most expensive when compared with the other two solutions vendors. Though McAfee offers a free trial phase for most of its antivirus software, it requires subscription for the protection to be updated. Numerous complain have also emerged in user review forums where McAfee charges accounts after users terminated their services. Usability A usability test conducted to compare the usability of most of endpoint security products puts Sophos products on the lead. The graph below illustrates the number of clicks required to accomplish a common task among major industry players. The best protection is one that is better to use. Sophos believes in usability and have tailored their end-point protection products to be accessed in only three clicks. Sophos is easy to use and customers are more likely to enable protection features much faster than other competitor products. For instance, in enabling Host Intrusion Prevention Systems, it takes only one click for Sophos products. SophosLabs is constantly surveying threats landscape to optimize its effectiveness. This has made them the leader in protection business since 80% of their customers take advantage of the easy protection capabilities. Another usability test conducted by Enex TestLabs on endpoint security products from an administrator’s point of view put Sophos on the lead. Sophos protection is attained without increased complexity or hindering integration or usability of their products. Technology based system McAfee had been using a software based technology in the development of their products. However, they have added a new dimension- hardware-based technology. McAfee uses a hardware based technology system in the development of its products. McAfee DeepSAFE Technology is a jointly-developed technology between McAfee and Intel to come up with hardware-based security products that take advantage of deeper security footprints. The technology sits beyond the operating system and close to the hardware to allow McAfee products to exhibit additional vantage points in the computing stack for better protection performance. DeepSAFE technology is the pillar of hardware-assisted security products that utilize deeper security footprints together with McAfee end-point security platforms in ensuring that organizations trust to protect their information and endpoints. Sophos uses both software based security technology as well as web-based security technology. Its software base security technology is contained in products such as End User Protection Suite, Web Application Firewall and Endpoint Antivirus. Recently, they announced the addition of web based security technology. This is manifested in products such as Endpoint Antivirus cloud. A web-based application such as Sophos Live Protection technologies leverages the clouds architecture to provide real time threat monitoring and protection. Cloud based protection products simplifies the roll out and management and includes proactive protection for both internal and external users unlike software or hardware based application. Symantec Security Technology and Response is a security research and development technology forming the backbone of its consumer and corporate products. STAR has developed a collaborative eco-system of security products based on; file-based, network-based, behavior-based, and reputation-based and remediation technologies. These technologies are majorly classified as software and hardware based systems. STARs network based protection systems works by analyzing the contents of a network and blocking what is undesirable. File-based protection uses the anti-Virus Engine, Auto-detect real time scanning and Malheur and Bloodhound heuristic-based protection technologies. Supported platform McAfee is widely supported by most operating systems. The Application Control is supported by Windows, Solaris and Linux operating systems. Most of its products are universally supported on Windows platform with few exceptions. For instance, encryption protection products are supported on Windows platform with exception of some customized for Mac, iOs and Adroid operating systems. Sophos products are supported in Windows, Mac, and Unix platforms. Each endpoint product has different system requirements according to platform and the vendor continues to develop new products to leverage new platforms such as mobile. Actually, most of the Sophos products are compatible with all the PC operating systems. User using Mac will get the same security software as the one using Windows or Solaris. Symantec products are supported on Windows as well as other platforms. Norton antivirus version 2013, for instance, requires the minimum requirements for Windows operating systems as well as different hardware requirements. The available disc memory should be 300MB, A CD/DVD drive and 1GB of RAM for Windows 7/8. Integration with other Existing tools Sophos antivirus software is easily integrated with other existing tools to provide comprehensive solution to an organization. Particularly, Sophos Safeguard Enterprise package support AES-NI encryption instructions. This includes pre-boot user authentication with a password, smartcard, biometric or key string as well as Corporate Single Sign On. It also supports configuration of DomainKeys Identified Mail for Email authentication. The default parameters for authentication mechanism are SHA-256 as the cryptographic hash and RSA as the public key encryption scheme. Symantec products can as well be integrated with existing tools in an organization. Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager with RSA SecureID is a sure way to authenticate administrators. By running RSA in the installation wizard, RSA SecureID token, SecureID card and keypad card can be enabled. The same can be done with Mail Server and Domain Controller. McAfee security products contain an integration module that supports other parameters. McAfee Endpoint Encyption, Email Gateway, Host Intrusion Prevention, VirusScan Enterprise as well as Network Access Control all support integration with other security control tools. The three companies readily integrate other malware prevention and control tools across multiple frameworks. In terms of integration, Sophos takes the lead with simple management interface and simple integration steps with other tools. Security software has to handle millions of digital malware signatures and complex algorithms to detect an incremental number of malware attacks. Vendors have devised a mechanism of preserving system resources through the use of in-the-cloud and intelligent caching technologies. According to tests conducted to determine the resource saving technologies that vendors have integrated in their endpoint security products on the following products, it revealed that McAfee leads. McAfee uses caching technologies to speed up regular scheduled scans. The speedup was identified at 87% much higher than Sophos at only 9%. Sophos was found to use minor optimizations and its lowest speedup value could be as a result of hard disk caching. Symantec’s scan time was the least and its true speedup was not visible. The graph indicates time to perform a scan of the system partition and a lower value indicates better results. The test was performed on identical computers with the same features: Intel Xeon Quad-Core X3360 CPU, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD running on Windows 7, 32 Bit and NTFS formatted system partition. Results indicated that McAfee is a good choice when a large amount of data is scanned on a regular interval as it contains the best data throughput and properly working speed optimization algorithms. McAfee have adopted optimization and caching in their enterprise products while other vendors have not. In conclusion, the choice of endpoint security solution depends on the needs of an organization. Likewise, the ease of use and integration with other security features is a determinant in acquiring an endpoint security solution. Sophos is rated the best in terms of usability, performance and pricing. With its End-user Protection Suite, an organizations needs including all users and all the devices no matter the number are protected, Sophos scores higher than McAfee and Symantec. Cloud’s is the next front in organizational computing. The provision of cloud based services such as Sophos Live Protection provides new opportunities for real time protection and eliminates the need for onsite software installation and management. The choice of any one solution among the three is dependent on a lot of factors and needs best outlined by each organization. Research by Cascadia Labs has rated Sophos as the best among the three due to its ease of installation, management, cost, compatibility and integration. If this graph is what is to go by, then Sophos is the winner. References McAfee. (n.d.). www.McAfee.com. Sophos. (n.d.). www.sophos.com. Symantec. (n.d.). End Point Security Solution. Retrieved www.symantec.com. Read More