With thanks to Master & Commander for the post title, I am thinking today about client protection suites. So you have your pick of all the usual suspects for antivirus/antispyware and add in the network protection features like firewall and maybe host IDS/IPS. Stir it all up and you have some good complexity going for the average small/medium shop.
If you accept that most of the solutions are relatively equal in their (in)ability to protect you from what my co-worker Matt likes to call 'goodness'. [Goodness (n.) - all the crap you get from surfing the web such as drive-by downloaders, droppers, keyloggers, bots, etc.]
Now look at the extra PITA of a management interface learning curve and how to make sense of the reporting options and find the glitches. Tired yet? Me too. Now think about switching to Microsoft Forefront Client Security 2010 and the integration with WSUS for easy updating. Plus what I have seen of Microsoft's free home av/as client Security Essentials (and before that OneCare) I believe they are getting enough data from home users to be able to do as well (arguably) as McAfee, Symantec and the rest of the usual suspects.
Pretty tempting, one ring to rule them all. To me it seems like a no brainer, provided there is a 3rd party scanning engine on the web security gateway/email filter (i.e. Kaspersky or another) to get a 2nd opinion on what is good or bad.
Now if only they would announce the RTM date for the 2010 client I could try to forget all that I know about big yellow client stuff. I could use that brainspace for other things like homebrew trivia or homework stuff.
Weevil image courtesy of Rentokil.com and their awesome blog post: I can has bugs?
Anybody in the pest control biz who loves lolcats has to be good.
http://www.rentokil.com/blog/
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