Endpoint antimalware: breaking down barriers to change

When working with organizations, the cost of replacing an incumbent endpoint antimalware solution can be a major roadblock. While operations and security teams may want to deploy a better solution, they need to address internal costs. The following are aspects teams need to consider.

Many times, Bitdefender customers cite two major reasons for wishing to make a change to a new endpoint antimalware solution. 1) Security teams are most often concerned about the cost of having sub-par endpoint antimalware. 2) Operations teams, especially virtualization teams, are most often looking to drastically decrease the performance impact of traditional antimalware.

Both concerns have a cost associated with them. While network-wide outbreaks are, fortunately, not as common as they once were, the routine of identifying infected endpoints and performing manual mitigation is familiar and costly. While difficult to assign a cost, it is worth considering that if infections and clean-up can be far less common with a strong solution, it stands to reason that a strong solution also lowers the chance of a data breach.

Performance issues in virtualized environments do lead to straightforward costs. If extra hardware must be procured to run production workloads, the cost-benefit of replacing a traditional antimalware product with a virtualization-specific solution is apparent.

Areas where cost-to-benefit gets murky often revolve around the management console. If replacing traditional antimalware in a virtualized environment, a point-solution is not ideal. Instead, a solution that is capable of securing traditional, virtualized, mobile, Windows and Linux, end-user and server, private and public cloud, is desirable. Also, being able to manage Exchange antispam and antimalware is a plus.

However, traditional management solutions are bulky, complicated, and very difficult to set up. Often, they are a collection of Windows-based applications obtained through acquisition that require external SQL databases, web servers, Windows servers, and so on. If such a management architecture has been deployed and carefully tuned over the years, the cost of replacement can seem overwhelming.

Bitdefender GravityZone is a new type of security management console. Rather than a loosely associated collection of applications, GravityZone contains modules that were built from the ground up by Bitdefender. The entire management infrastructure is a self-contained cloud delivered as a virtual appliance. Even easier, Bitdefender also leverages the public cloud to provide a hosted management console.

In the final analysis, replacing an endpoint security management solution is never about just the relative cost of the solution. There are benefits to upgrading security, performance advantages to having virtualization-specific solutions and having a single solution spanning traditional, virtualized, cloud, and mobile endpoints, along with Exchange servers. Replacing a management solution shouldn’t be costly and difficult – and isn’t if you plan ahead and pick the best solution for your needs.

For more information about GravityZone, visit http://www.bitdefender.com/business/