Alternative Enterprise Anti-Virus Solutions?

Darth_brooks asks: "I admin for a great non-profit organization that has spent the last year rebuilding after a massive fire. We've got a pretty tight system running now, especially compared to the unmanaged chaos that existed before the fire. Firefox for surfing and T-bird for for e-mail, WSUS for updates, and we're slowly replacing Office with OpenOffice. But out anti-virus solution (command AV, a holdover from our old system) is not cutting the mustard. Specifically the management console isn't exactly reliable, and we just don't feel like we're getting our money's worth. What alternatives can the Slashdot crowd suggest?"

"The two obvious names that come to mind are Norton and Mcafee. Since all of our machines are donated, we really don't have the resources for Norton (who does?) and Mcafee's just been dealt a black eye. In addition, we're on a limited budget. Our machines are mostly P2 & P3's, and we're an XP / Active Directory shop with some scattered Fedora & BSD boxes scattered about for non-desktop tasks.

The biggest features we're looking for are the ability to centrally manage updates (which rules of AVG's free edition), and a reasonable price tag for licenses for 50-60 machines. Our current solution is only in place because we signed a long term licensing agreement, and I don't want to see us get into another deal for a product that doesn't turn out to be as god as advertised. I'd also like to hear some of the Horror / Success stories from users."

Re:Just get AVG and be done with it

[palndrumm]

Mod +1, That's What We Just Did.

AVG does the job well, doesn't completely take over any machine it's installed on causing massive performance problems, is dead simple to deploy & administer, and was the best value for money of all the various AV solutions we looked at.

Linux

[MarkByers]

Use Linux and be done with it. No need for AV software.

ClamAV is quite good - but there are tricks

[inflex]

As with most solutions to these situations you may find yourself needing a -mix-.

Personally, I use ClamAV on the mailserver (incombination with Xamime - http://xamime.com/ [xamime.com] works well and keeps a majority of the things out.

However, you really need an orthagonal approach too, that includes banning things that aren't meant to be coming into your network in the first place, as well has having perhaps a different branded AV agent on the client machines.

Getting rid of (if possible) the vectors used by the viruses on the workstations helps a lot too. ActiveX, Macros (okay, not many people can live without those in office I suppose).

Re:Linux

[TheRealDamion]

Although this is marked troll, and possibly was meant as one. The original article does mention having switched to firefox, thunderbird and OOo. So frankly I fail to see why it wouldn't be quite an easy step. It would probably provide faster and certainly cheaper desktops. Ignore the "is it ready for the desktop" waffle we've seen on /. for years, this is a place where there is a support staff, so users just need to use their desktops for work and the hard stuff is done by the admin.

CA's eTrust AV: I've heard it's good and cheap.

[Optic7]

I've heard some good things about CA's eTrust antivirus (that it's a good virus catcher and has low resource usage), although I have not used it myself, so would be curious to see what folks here think.

Regarding costs, they claim on their page that: "Affordability. eTrust Antivirus gives you industrial-strength protection at a low price. We guarantee a lower price over the cost of renewing your current antivirus subscription, and we offer the lowest total cost of ownership of any antivirus software solution on the market today." Sounds pretty good to me.