Is this the meaning of the announcement about the licensing agreement between Bigfix and Trend Micro a couple of days ago? The press release explicitly mentions a web protection module, but hints at more.
Does it also have implications for the other Endpoint Protection components (AntiPest and Firewall)?
I’m interested partly because we have only just started to figure out and deploy the antivirus/antipest components, and if changes are soon to come perhaps we shouldn’t invest too much time getting familiar with the current versions.
I sure hope it replaces CA ver 7.x entirely, our networks can’t leave the active scanner going because of software conflicts with the CA ver 7.x product and Net Framwork. I look forward to the change and hope it does AV/Anti Spy etc all in that package.
We will still continue to support CA and they continue to be a partner.
Additionally, our Trend Micro partnership is very strong and we have made very good progress with their products. I have been playing with it a lot recently and I like Trend’s model of the AntiVirus and AntiSpyware and more in their one agent and it seems quite effective. In my personal deployment, I run all Trend now.
Contact your sales representative if you have questions about licensing.
We have been working with Ben and his amazing group for about a month now - evaling the new Trend site offering. I don’t know how to put this any more directly…Big Fix and Trend rock!
After the first week of testing the waters - we immediately decided to get a PO ready and have placed the pilot on the fast track. Everyone know’s the strengths of Big Fix. Now imagine those strengths and real time visibility with a full EPP (End Point Protection) suite in Trend. Starting back in February - we hadn’t gotten further than 20 production workstation deployments - to find that 20% of them had a virus or spyware (some even with trojans). As we continued to deploy that 20% infection rate continued. We learned a valuable lesson - don’t ever assume your AV install has your back.
We also found that with the displacement of the old AV install - workstation performance improved. We surveyed some users prior to Trend and after Trend was installed. Workstations that were given a 1 for usability (1-10 scale - 10 being the best) - were now sliding up the scale to 6-7 after Trend (some of these models are older and thus probably would never reach 10). The dispersion of definition updates and full manual scans that used to cripple many workstations (and some servers) during the process - are now un-noticed. With Trend - we have run many manual scans on unexpecting users (while we watched for reactions - physically standing near by while they happily typed away at their keyboard) - and no one flinched. The definition updates are also unnoticed.
I cannot guarantee this success for everyone. However, we have seen very impressive results and have nothing negative to say. We have a baseline that removes several components of the old AV, the Big Fix Antipest - then installs the Trend components (including the Web Protection module), policy and config fixlets and then does a full manual scan. The removal and installation takes on average 5-10 minutes and the scan takes anywhere from 30-60 minutes. We have had no users place help desk calls during the process - and only a couple have noticed that the old AV system icon tray is no longer. A reboot is a good idea at the end - however, we are doing the process with no forced reboots.
We are very pleased and excited about the BF and Trend partnership and the great work that has been put into this offering. This is a huge win for us!
I couldnt imagine a better AV to go in Big Fix than Trend Micro. The CA product featured with Big Fix has been used by our company for over 5 years. It has been less than desirable under our current configuration of networks. We did the trial for Trend Micro before we did the trial for Big Fix but decided on Big Fix because of all the other things it could do for us, now maybe we can finally have our cake and eat it with the right flavor of icing.
Is it the new Trend cloud-client architecture? I was going to ask for an eval but wasn’t sure it was quite ready yet. We’re an existing Trend Officescan deployment so it would be a natural migration to the new lighter AV client.
It sounds like another BigFix success story in the making for many existing Trend deployments. It will be a welcome change when the AV client can go un-noticed foir a change
Thanks for the info. I’m especially ready to sign up after the thumbs up.
The “in the cloud” offering is the Web Protection Module (WPM) and is a separate BES site and managed separately then the Trend Core Protection Module (CPM). WPM is very powerful and fast. The auto URL lookup to the cloud is as fast as a DNS lookup. It is not a URL filter, such as Websense and thus you do not choose categories to block such as Adult or Games. WPM protects you from going to known malicious sites that have undesirable content.
We originally were going to utilize WPM only for roaming laptops - however, as we have been deploying our pilot of CPM, we have been finding many virus and spyware infections on workstations, even with several layers of gateway protection solutions. Many of the gateway or edge solutions rely on scheduled “definitions” or “lists” - where as WPM is updated constantly and about as close to real time protection as we can get these days. We believe that relying on solutions at the edge is not enough and that strong end point protection is still very valuable. So now - WPM is going out to all workstations.
From what I have heard at Big Fix - the WPM will at some point in the future become part of CPM. Currently there are only a small hand full of features available with WPM that the BES administrator can control. However, it is what it is - in that it provides great protection with almost no overhead to the workstation or laptop (and we have seen no false/positives to date). As with everything that Big Fix does - I expect they will continue to add more control and features in the future.
