Zit Seng's Blog

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ESET Endpoint Security Solutions

Let me guess. You might have heard of ESET, but you’re not very familiar with their products? Well, you could be forgiven, because they’ve got just 2% share of Singapore installations and 9% share of the global installations. But they have promising products and look set to grow from strength to strength.

I attended their blogger engagement event a couple of days ago. They were announcing their new flagship product ESET Endpoint Solutions for enterprise customers. They also shared the imminent availability of ESET Mobile Security for Android.

ESET isn’t a new anti-virus company. They have been in business since 1992. Their anti-virus product, NOD32, was created by two of their founders prior to that in 1987. That’s some 20 years and 25 years ago respectively. ESET is pretty proud to lay claim to be the only company to win an unbroken string of 47 Virus Bulletin’s VB100 awards, and their overall win of 71 VB100 awards is more than any other company. They have also received a variety of certifications from AV-Test, TUV, and West Coast Labs.

ESET’s Endpoint Solutions for enterprise customers come as two products: Endpoint Security and Endpoint Antivirus. Both products build upon their NOD32 anti-virus scanning technology to deliver a proactive approach to detect current and new malware and other Internet threats. They offer whitelisting of “safe files” that are cross-checked against their reputation database for optimized performance. As an enterprise solution, these products also feature enhanced ESET Remote Administrator, a control panel for centrally managing clients.

The Endpoint Security product offers additional features over Endpoint Antivirus, such as a firewall, web-control and spam-filter.

ESET’s enterprise-friendly licensing focuses on seat-count, regardless of the type of device being protected. If you are faced with an environment comprising Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems, you just need to buy licenses for that number of devices without having to work out how many of each type of operating systems you have, or worry about how that mix of operating systems might change in future.

For me, an important feature, but one that is often not talked about, is performance. ESET’s use of assembly language delivers the tightest performance with low CPU overheads, memory overheads and disk utilization. Anti-virus protection is important, but you wouldn’t want that to impact the performance of your computer.

The next thing is their Android product, ESET Mobile Security for Android. It’s set to become available in the Google Play store on 2 May 2012. Here’s a preview of their feature list:

  • Remote Lock
  • Remote Wipe
  • GPS Localization
  • SIM Matching
  • Trusted Friend
  • Call Blocking
  • Uninstall Protection
  • SMS/MMS Anti-spam
  • Real-time Protection
  • Security Audit
  • On-access Scanning
  • On-demand Scanning

A nice thing about the remote features (such as Remote Lock, Remote Wipe and GPS Localization) is that they are accessed and managed via SMS. There is no central server like MobileMe or iCloud in the case of Apple’s iOS.

I’m still quite undecided if I need anti-virus on my mobile phone. But if you’re the type who feel you can’t be too careful with security, checkout ESET Mobile Security for Android when it becomes available on Wednesday.

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